HisHersMoney

Last month we moved from our apartment in a high rise into a townhouse that we are renting. Overall the new place is larger and includes a third bedroom which allows both both of us to have our own home office space but the storage in the kitchen is definitely much smaller, especially the pantry. As a result we definitely need to reduce our pantry size. My plan is just to skip the grocery shopping trip and work through the fridge, freezer and pantry. This week’s grocery trip will cover just some basics, bread, creamer and a couple other perishables.

So, how does this relate to personal finance and living frugally? By skipping the grocery trip pretty much all together you actually free up some immediate cash. We usually spend about $75-$100 a week at the food store which covers three meals a day for two people combined with eating out usually for one lunch and one dinner a week.

Last week’s grocery food budget was around $15 and this week caps out at $50 while I work though what we already have. Though out the week I will post about what we come up with for meals to give you some ideas for your own money saving pantry clean out.  

Right now we have about $17,000 in savings. Some of this money is already spoken for, ski trips this winter, money towards our Roth IRAs, etc. I have to say it wasn’t as hard to get here as I thought it would be. I can’t tell you the last time I went clothes shopping like I used to, or the last time His went crazy buying electronics or video games.

The biggest enabler for us was learning to live on one paycheck so that the second one goes right in savings. We still have two checking accounts. His paycheck goes in the main account and Hers still goes in Her credit union. We live on His to pay all the household bills and insurance and the only things that comes out of Hers is one car payment and the ski condo expenses.

This is currently allowing us allocate $1850 from His paycheck towards debt repayment / savings and about $3500-$4000 from Hers paycheck each month into savings. Our goal is to reach $5000 a month in savings outside of our 401k and Roth IRa contributions.

I think it is completely in our reach!

We are almost debt free!! I can’t wait until we can say we are completely debt free. We have about $600 left on the credit card to pay and less then $2000 left on His student loan. We will be paying off the rest of the credit card in this upcoming month and have already stated paying an additional $100 a month on the student loan making our payments around $175 a month.

Side note: We do have a car loan. We made a decision over a year ago to have one car loan at a time. We would finance the car for four years and when it was paid off we would replace the other car. So yes, we will always have a car loan to pay on but we plan on driving each car for eight years. It’s the cost of having two cars for us. YMMV (your milage may vary).

So far since we have started this blog we have paid off one car loan, two other student loans and over $14,000 in credit card debt. It wasn’t easy but I don’t feel like we’ve had to give everything up to do it. Just buckled down and made it our priority.

Next goal is really working on the savings account!

Lots of people dream of owning a vacation home. Somewhere in the mountains, by the beach or maybe even in another country. But, what are the costs associated with such a property. Previous reading will explain how we came to be 30% owners in such a property. FOr us it was a ski condo right at the base of the mountain, just mere steps from the lift. We made the purchase with cash so we don’t have a mortgage to deal with but there are so many costs associated with it.

A lot of the costs we figured into our buying decision so they weren’t a surprise, but now that we are getting to our fifth month we are getting a look at the grand total.

Utilities / property management/pool, etc. = about $100 a month. This cost is not bad and we knew this going in.

Condo specific bills from the property (cleaning, maintenance to your specific unit, replacing kitchen items) = $500 a year. We really didn’t know about this entire bill. We figured probably around $200 a year as a rough estimate.

Furnishings, updating decor, large maintenance = around $3500 for the first year. This will not be a recurring cost as the unit was definitely outdated and needed all new furniture. Luckily the cost is split between the owners and we only owe our 30%. We knew that things would need to be updated but really didn’t know how much it would cost.

There are some other things in the condo that need updating that require some minor construction that are going to have to come either later this year or next year. I estimate anther $500 for those. This does not include the costs of a major kitchen or bathroom update that will have to be done in the upcoming years.

We had originally thought we could do a total rehab for $10,000 (our portion) but failed to take into account that with the unit being used on a consistent basis by not only the owners but also renters that the items purchased for the condo would need to be of a pretty high quality in order to not fall apart in just a few years.

The renovations and new furniture is complete for the bedroom. It involved some minor construction to move around the heating vents, new dresser, mirror, king size bed, headboard, frame and all new linens. Luckily the resort gets a little bit of a discount because of the quantity they purchase from certain vendors. It really helped us out.

We figure our total out of pocket expenses for the first year will be about $5700! That doesn’t even include a lift ticket or Apres Ski Beer!

As a result of our upcoming housing costs savings I spend a little time on the budget.   Currently between Him and Hers we get four paychecks a month. Usually our rent comes out of His paycheck in the amount of $1175 out of each check to make up our $2350 rent payment. (Rent is very high here!) Rather then split our rent payment in half each month we will just take it out of the last paycheck of the month in its entirety $1350. This will obviously fee up some additional money each month.

Our first priority is to replenish our savings since we raided them a couple months ago to buy the ski condo. We figure that we really need about $30k in savings as an emergency account as well as to have some cash on hand to do things we want to do. Another priority is our Roth IRAs. We are eligible to contribute the entire amount to a Roth IRA this year so we need to take advantage while we can, I’m afraid we will be phased out of our eligibility in the upcoming years.

Currently we only have $1300 put in to Hers Roth so far this year so that leaves another $8700 to go in order for both of us to max out at $5k each.

Our savings account is currently at about $3,000 so we still have another $27,000 to go there!

Our new budget calls for us to put around $1000 a month aside for out Roth IRAs with the final contribution to hit our max coming from Hers year end bonus

As of July 1st we are moving out of our apartment and into a house we rented. The new place is just over ten minutes from where we live now so not too far away. We currently rent a two bedroom apartment in a pretty nice building but with our lease renewal they wanted to raise our rent up more than we were willing to pay. We found a three bedroom three and a half bath townhouse that was really in great shape and had a big back deck so we decided the extra amenities that the apartment building offered weren’t enough to keep us. Our rent will actually be cheaper at the new place even though it is much bigger. RIght away we will see a $450 a month savings just in base rent (yes the utilities will probably be a little higher).

The townhouse is three stories high and the bottom floor has its own bath room and walk out patio area in addition to a large amount of space. We have a friend who was looking for a place to rent and it turns out that it is perfect for him. We didn’t ask for too much rent, just enough to save us some money and be a great deal for him.

After the additional rent savings due to our room mate we will actually save about $1000 a month! While we are psyched about this savings, we wouldn’t have done the room mate thing if the house set up wasn’t what is was where he have have his own space downstairs and we can have ours.

Hopefully it will work out for everyone! We will post in the future about how it’s working out.

Being a frugal family buying new “toys” isn’t something that is front and foremost in our minds, but sometimes it just happens. Our new gadget is a Breville Juicer. I shopped around online for it to compare capabilities, reviews and prices. We ended up choosing this model which had a larger motor, more speeds and the fact that all the pieces were dishwasher safe!   

When we had narrowed it down to a few models we then turned to price. The Breville Ikon model seemed to be at a good price point in the market and the cost didn’t vary too much depended on where we bought it. We bought ours from SurLaTable which had a good price and had a store locally which meant we could drive right over and pick it up. No shipping costs and no waiting because they had it in stock.

So far for fruit juices we have made fresh orange juice which was so delicious, orange and strawberry juice and mixed fruit juice with oranges, apples and strawberries. FOr vegetable juices I made a carrot juice yesterday which was surprisingly yummy and we have also made a celery, cilantro and lime juice which I put too much lime in and a tomato, celery and carrot juice which I put too much tomato in.

A few adjustments are ongoing as to the balance between the fruits a vegetables but so far most everything has been really good. I foresee a future with lots of fresh fruits and veggies making their way to my home from costco!

For those of you who use coupons you can imagine how nice it would be if your grocery store tripled them. Well that’s exactly what our store did this past weekend. Every once in awhile, maybe every two months or so, our grocery store will offer triple coupons for all coupons under $1.00. They limit each customer to 20 coupons so sometimes Him and I have to each go through the line separately. This was the case this past weekend.

Every week when I go through the coupons I cut out those coupons that are for things that we buy all the time but I also snag the ones that are for things that I would buy during triple coupon weekend because I can get the items dirt cheap. The best deal is when we find the $.75 coupons on things like granola bars, salad dressings and condiments, etc.

Things we got:

Chex Granola Bars, on sale 2/$5 with $.75 off coupons on each of them so they were $0.25 each.

Regular mustard and honey mustards for about $0.09 each. We don’t need more than one of these items so we will drop the extras in the next food donation bin that we are asked to donate to.

Barilla pasta and sauce, the pasta was about $0.10 each and the sauce was about $0.75 each and we got three of each.

We also got a couple things of cat litter, dishwasher detergent, Zip Stream Bags, Mayo, salad dressing, Pepperidge Farms snack crackers, deli cheese, snacks, rolls, coffee creamer, beer, four different kinds of rice mixes, and the list goes on. Our pantry is definitely stocked now!

We ended up with receipts that exceeded two and a half feet long! Here’s the break down:

Receipt #1 Total owed: $46.74, coupons savings of $41.94 and sales savings of $16.55

Receipt #2 Total owed: $32.59, coupon savings of $46.18 and sales savings of $22.64

That’s a savings of $127.31!!!

Let me tell you, being strapped for cash totally bites the big one! The whole goal of living our frugal lifestyle is so that we won’t have to live paycheck to paycheck and yet, here we are, looking forward to pay day like the day will never get here quick enough.

We recently posted that we were buying a ski condo share in Colorado, Steamboat to be exact. Well we are actually buying a portion of a ski condo for $18,500 plus a few hundred in closing costs. We are paying cash for the condo which means we had to raid every account we owned to come up with the money. Not only our joint accounts but the individual savings accounts that we had from before we got married this past fall.

Well, we scraped together the cash. We were able to hold off on cashing in the savings bonds and scraping the bottom of all the barrels thanks to a $2700 tax refund which arrived prior to the closing date which was today.

We finalized the offer about three weeks ago and knew the amount we had to come up with so we have been in a cash is King mode ever since. Every time we even spend a dollar on groceries it required thought as to how it affected our bottom line and our ability to pay for the condo.

Once we were under contract we had our $2500 earnest payment on the line and we weren’t walking away from that. We also weren’t going to run up our credit card or get a loan so cash was the only way to go.

So, how did we do? The cash was wired to the title company yesterday in full and closing went through today without a hitch. Condo done.

Our living expenses while we pulled together the cash on the other hand were tight and I have to say we really didn’t do a very good job at “cutting back” during this time. In fact, our effort lacked all commitment on both of our parts! We ended up with about $550 put on the credit card this month. There are a couple grocery charges, a few eating out and social bills as well as a $200 Breville Juicer that I had to have (post to come).

We plan on paying off the bill before any interest is charged but it just means when we get back on our feet with our paychecks it will be another month before we get back ahead of the game and stop living paycheck to paycheck. Our lesson learned here is that we wish we had a bit more in savings because now our savings is cleaned out and we are starting from scratch but it’s also another opportunity to do the right thing.

The best part: we own a ski condo free and clear!!!

Everyone knows that the real estate market is in the toilet and if you have the resources, now is a good time to buy. Well, we’re not in the market to buy a house or condo in the area we live, Washington DC/Northern VIrginia, but that doesn’t mean we can’t take advantage of the down market.

We have been silently keeping our eye on real estate in Steamboat Colorado were we like to ski. Over the past few years we have spent anywhere from $2000-$3000 a year on lodging there when we visit during the winter skiing months. We have been looking at what they call fractional ownership. It’s were some number of you own a particular condo and share it throughout the year.

The calendar is split up between you and your co-owners in advance and you know which weeks you have. We were originally looking at a place that sold out in either 1/8th or 1/4th shares. We were looking at the 1/4th share which included one week each month and a second week one month of the year which rotated each week. You had the choice of either using your weeks or putting them in a rental pool.

The price on those units right now is between $80k-$90k. In order to finance the cost you needed to put down around half of the cost. The kicker on these particular units was the HOA fees where were a hefty $300+ per month! While this condo wasn’t completely out of our grasp we didn’t have the down payment required so we were busy saving away.

In the meantime, about two weeks ago a unit came on the market in the building next door. It’s pretty much the same situation but the building isn’t quite as nice or as new and also doesn’t come with the hefty price tag either. The unit started out at the $30k price but had dropped to $22k with HOA fees of $100 a month and taxes of $500 per year. This was definitely closer to our price range.

This particular unit is a 30% ownership and includes 6 consecutive winter ski weeks as well as a few weeks in the Spring and Fall.   We made a low offer on the pace of $15k and settled with the seller for $18k. We plan on paying cash for the purchase and we close on the condo in about 10 days!

In upcoming posts we will go into detail about the cash payment as well as the impact to our day to day finances.