One Lucky Girl

My husband starts his part-time job tonight. He will be working from 6.30 PM – 1 AM. He will also work on Sunday from 11AM – 6PM. This part-time job is only from October – May. He should be able to bring in an extra $400 – 600 each month from this gig. Not bad for a part-time job.

Tomorrow, we are going to a home and patio show. We plan on going to the show early in the morning. My husband’s football team is playing at 3.30 tomorrow and I have an appointment with a dog trainer at 3.30 as well. After that we are going to see Beverly Hills Chihuahua at the movie theater. Two of our Chihuahuas look like the 2 main characters.

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This week, for 5 days straight, I was able to not go out for lunch or eating out for dinner!!! I usually bring lunches from home but sometimes I get tempted to buy something else during lunch. But this week I was really good. So I am happy for that. Also, my husband and I have been eating dinner at home this whole week. Tomorrow, we might get lunch somewhere–we have tons of buy-one-get-one-free coupons. I still have some grocery that I can cook to make lunches and dinners for maybe couple days next week. My husband still has about one loaf of meatloaf. I plan to make him Turkey chili tomorrow for dinner. The weather is starting to cool and I think chili would make a nice dinner on a cool evening. I don’t know what else I am going to cook for him. I think the grocery store has some chicken on sale so I might get some for him.

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Today I was having a debate with myself on what I should really do with the money my mom is going to send. She is sending me $20,000 to fix up the house. My husband thinks we should pay off our debts (or at least some of them).

I feel bad that everytime I ask for money to my mom I always tell her it is for the house but then we always use it to pay our debts or something else. This time my mom is being super generous and she is giving us $20,000 to fix up our house. I was so excited. I want to have a pretty little house. I don’t want my house to be the ugliest house on the block. My house is pretty small comparing our neighbors’ house but that does not bother me. What bothers me is that I see very, very little improvements in my house since 3 years ago when we bought it. I really really really want to put fences around my house so I can let my big dogs outside during nice cool days. They could use more exercise in the backyard. I also want to start enjoying my porch with my dogs in the afternoon. I have nice big porch but since we have no fence, I can’t really let  my dogs out in the front porch. They always run to the streets and I hate that. So having my house fenced is definitely on top of my list. Also another thing I want is to have my kitchen done. I am not talking about having a super duper kitchen. I want a real kitchen. Something simple. And I want a laundry room. I am tired of going to the laundry room every weekend. I hate it.

At the same time, I also want to save money. I wish I could save all the money that my mom sends me. All $20,000. That would make our emergency fund up close tol $24,000, which translates to 8 months of living expenses should both me and my husband lose our jobs.

To  make things complicated, I also want to make a dent in our debts. That $20,000 would make a serious dent in our debts. That would actually wipe out all our CC debts–mine is about $6000 and my husband’s $14,000. If we paid off our debts, we’d wipe out about $800 in CC payments every month.

$5360 (total combined take-home income per month) – $3075 (living expenses + 2 cars payments) = $2285 —> per month that we can save!!!!

This sound SOOOOO good. I am actually tempted to do that. Wipe out all our CC debts. Gosh. That would be nice. But I also want to fix up the house. Part of me wants to use the money to completely fix up the house and part of me want to wipe out our CC debts. But I feel that our CC debts are our responsibility and it is not fair to use the money  my mom gives me to wipe out the debts when she wants us to use the money for the house. If we use all the money to wipe out the debts, it will take us about 10 months to save $20,000.

In March 2009, I should be getting about $13,000 in bonus money.

Ok let’s say we used the money my mom gives me to wipe out the debts. So this month, we’d be out of CC debts. That means, we should be able to save at least $2000 (I won’t count my husband’s part-time income) each month. And by end of March, we should be able to save $12,000 (2000×6 months). Also in March, I will be receiving $13,000 in bonus money. So, $12,000 + $13,000 = $25,000 in 6 months.

My husband’s part-time job should give us extra money as much as $5000 in total by March 2009. Plus come to think of it, I should be getting a raise again in December to be effective in January 2009. I expect to get $200/month raise (after tax and after 2% increase to my retirement account).

If we want to go crazy, we could use the $25,000 saved by March 2009 to pay off our cars (should be less than $20,000 by then). This would lower our expenses by $625 to $2450 per month. Assuming our take home income was going to be $5500/month, this would make a possible saving of $3050 every month. Holy Cow. Do you know what this means? This means, my husband and I can live on one income!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! His income alone would be sufficient to support both of us!!! That would be a life transformation for us really. And this also means that starting March 2009, we would be able to save at least $3000/month. And we’d be able to use the money to fix up our house.

What do you think???