My Debt Reduction Blog » Finances http://www.mydrblog.com/blog Our road down debt reduction to elimination, and living without a budget Mon, 18 Aug 2008 13:47:13 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.2 en The time is here http://www.mydrblog.com/blog/2008/01/18/the-time-is-here/ http://www.mydrblog.com/blog/2008/01/18/the-time-is-here/#comments Fri, 18 Jan 2008 20:34:53 +0000 Chad http://www.mydrblog.com/blog/2008/01/18/the-time-is-here/ My wife has been going to school to become a teacher, and now her time to start student teaching has arrived. What does this mean for us? Well, it’s actually quite substantial. It means she had to quit her full time job, which also provided all our family insurance needs, so she can take over an actual class full time for six months for no salary. Her last day was last Friday and she starts student teaching this Monday. While she wasn’t making a ton of money at her job, we still needed every penny to get through every month.

I really don’t know what is going to happen over the next six months. She has picked up a part time job, but it’s not nearly enough to help us cover our current monthly expenses. We’re hoping to get our taxes filed right away so our return can cover a couple of months. And this weekend I’ll be scouring the house looking for items to sell. Other than that, we can only wait to see what happens.

When student teaching is over, she will then get her teacher certification and can start applying for teaching jobs. And with any luck she will land one before the start of the next school year. If that happens, she would then be making about 15k/yr more than she was at the job she just quit. Plus our girls will be starting kindergarten this fall, which means no more pre-school costs(saving us over $17,000/yr). So the second half the year could end up being a real boost for us.

Only time will tell.

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]]> http://www.mydrblog.com/blog/2008/01/18/the-time-is-here/feed/ Some changes to our emergency fund http://www.mydrblog.com/blog/2007/10/15/some-changes-to-our-emergency-fund/ http://www.mydrblog.com/blog/2007/10/15/some-changes-to-our-emergency-fund/#comments Mon, 15 Oct 2007 12:17:25 +0000 Chad http://www.mydrblog.com/blog/2007/10/15/some-changes-to-our-emergency-fund/ Over the last week, I moved and made a modification to our emergency fund. First, the magic number everyone throws around it having $1,000 for an emergency fund. Well, I’ve decided to bump it up to $1,500. This decision was made a few weeks ago when I had to use $500 of it. It seemed weird to use $500 and notice that 50% of the emergency fund is gone. I’ve since replenished the fund and brought it up to $1,500.

The other change made was I moved it from our ING savings to our local bank where we have our checking account. It became apparent a few weeks ago when I needed use some of it, that ING wasn’t the best place for it. Had it been a true emergency, I would have been screwed as it took 4 or 5 days to get the money into our checking account.

So to review; I’ve increased our emergency fund to $1,500 and I moved it to a savings account at our local bank fir quicker access.

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