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!

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

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!!!

What goes into this total:

Full Roth IRA savings for two, Savings ING, & Full 401k contributions for two

That is a total of over $64,000 a year!

It is reasonable to assume that the Vacation Account would occasionally be pretty empty as it is now because we just came back from a couple vacations. But the others really need some work! I just really combed through the budget and set up recurring deposits to the accounts in order to expedite our savings growth.

I have set it up to put $1,500 a month into our ING. We had set a goal of $22,800 for the year. Obviously we are not off to a great start! We also have a few other small savings vehicles, TD Ameritrade through the Suze Orman deal plus I”m currently putting a couple hundred a month back into my (Her’s) savings account to reimburse myself for the $7k I put down on the car. Obviously it will take 35 months to actually reimburse the amount, but every little bit helps

Her entered the marriage with about $19k total in savings. $7k of that Her put as a down payment on her BMW but there is currently about $12k in savings which Her regularly contributes to by putting any left over amount from her “allowance”.

Can we still make our goal of $22,800? I’m not sure but there is no reason why we can’t try!

When reviewing our spending from 2008 we really didn’t over spend on any one thing, but it was the $12 here, $20 there etc that really just added up. By going to cash we are really going to have to make an actual decision every time we spend. It was so much easier to pull our the debit card knowing that there was money in the account to cover it.

We both get an allowance of $300 a month to do with what we want so if we really want to do something and our budgeted money is gone we can easily dip into our personal funds if we choose to but what we aren’t going to do is get more money out of the joint account!

Currently it looks like we should be able to save $1900 a month. I have gone into our ING account and set up automatic recurring deposits for these funds which are spread out between various sub-accounts.  This will give us $22,800 for the year.

What is our plan for this money?

1. Money for Christmas next year

2. Emergency Account

3. Vacation Account

4. New Car Account

5. House Down Payment Account

We really need to attack our Emergency Savings account goal this year! Our goal is to save $12k towards this number in 2009. We already have about $5k saved so this will bring us to a total of $17k which is about 60% of our total goal. That’s $1000/month. Can we do it? Really, there’s no reason why we can’t.

On a monthly basis here’s our savings plan:

1. $100 Savings towards car purchase, pay cash in about 3 years
2. $250 Vacation account, where ever, when ever
3. $50 Next year’s xmas savings
4. $1000 Emergency savings
5. $350 towards down payment fund

That’s a total of $1750 a month and $21,000 for the year. On paper it looks like January will be about $400 short of that goal. We are going on an unplanned vacation over New Years with a group of friends that we really didn’t plan or save for.

In addition to this savings we have $417/person going towards maxing out our Roth IRAs and $16,000/person going into our 401k accounts which adds another $42k towards our retirement!

We will track and post our progress through the year.

I looked around both online and in the flyers and really didn’t see anything else we needed or that was on the Christmas list that was a great deal. Him found a computer game that he wanted that was on sale for $10 with free shipping from Best Buy so we picked that up as a stocking stuffer.

I was surprised to see that a ski jacket that I bought from Sports Authority a couple of weeks ago was actually more expensive today even though it was on the cover of there Black Friday ad. Just goes to show that you really need to know your prices before shopping.

I saw on the tv this morning that they were giving a few holiday tips. Some of which were basic: wear comfortable shoes, duh. But a couple were good tips: If you find what you want buy it now and keep all of your reciepts so if the price comes down you can get a price adjustment.

I am basically done all of my xmas shopping and stayed pretty close to budget. Him and I budgeted $225 each for each other and I came within 10% so that works for me. We ordered some photo albums from MyPublisher online with some pictures of us to give to family which included engagement and wedding pictures so those will be going out to the parents and grandparents. We shopped ahead of time with them and got 50% off.

Other than that there are just a few small things I might need to pick up such as office gifts but nothing that will break the budget. We put away $25 every two weeks into our INGDirect savings account so the money was ready and waiting for us when it came time to shop!

His Roth IRA: this is a new investment for Him. This year it looks like His Roth will not be fully funded as we are just starting it, but we are setting it up to take $400 a month out. Next year we will be starting in Jan and plan on continuing with $417/month

Her Roth IRA: $417/month in order to fully fund it this year.

Both His and Hers are putting $1200/month in our 401k’s for a total of $2,400/month. That gives us a grand total of $3,034 a month in retirement savings.

$500 more per month goes into our retirement home fund.

All of these amounts are automatically taken out of our paychecks and/or checking accounts so we never even have the opportunity to spend even a cent of it. Our grand total each month is $3,734 for a yearly total of $44,808. We have a financial planner who tells us how much we need and keeps us on track.

We also have monthly savings that go towards other things which I will get into in my next post, but this wraps up our automatic retirement savings.

Smartypig has stated that at some point they are going to allow you to EFT the funds back into the account from which you originally funded from. This was not the case when I went to close my account on 15 May. I was planning on getting Amazon gift cards as there is a speaker set that I’ve been saving for there. The process was easy and I was notified that any extra funds left over from the gift card purchase (they only allowed $25 increments) would be funded into an electronic Smartypig gift card that I could put towards my other savings goal.  That’s a nice feature.

My big complaint is that it supposedly will take 7-10 business days to get me a gift card! If they are indeed partnered with these companies, it should only take 1-2 business days to get the card in the mail to me. As of now I have not received the card. Now granted, we moved and the mail is forwarding so I will check the postmark when it comes but it’s disappointing.

In the future I’ll be forgoing Smartypig and just creating sub-accounts with ING. It will be slightly less return but it’s worth it for less headaches in using my money.