In November, I paid my usual monthly payment of $103.67, plus an additional payment of $691.67, for a total of $795.34. That additional payment is a new high point for a non-birthday month.
Of my nearly eight-hundred dollars, $12.51 was applied to interest, while $782.83 was applied to the principal. I did contact my company to see if I could have extra payments go only to the principal, and the answer was a lot of sentences that distilled down to: no.
I have a nice long list of this and that that added up to nearly seven-hundred dollars. There was extra money coming into my life: Matt paid me twice for food, I cashed in Fred Meyer Rewards, I found a dollar. That added up to $155.96. My original budget was $180 for this goal. To that I added the $185.34 that was left over after things had been budgeted for. Plus another $30.00 for biking and walking to work. Then, at the end of the month I swept unused money from budget categories: groceries, joint bills, dining out.
I didn’t add anything to the list of things not bought in service of this goal. It was a happily frugal month. My only roadblock right now is being caught up in the idea that I will get a bonus from work. We didn’t get bonuses last year, but because I pay the bills at work, I could see the profit and loss wasn’t going to support bonuses. This year is much healthier, P&L-wise, and so I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about something that might not happen. And I think at this writing (12/13) it’s not going to happen. I think if we were getting bonuses, they would have announced it at the holiday party. So I need to stop thinking about it.
Onward to December!
Nice. Below $5,000. So exciting.