HisHersMoney

Right now in our joint savings we only have $2119! That is embarrassing! We have the following accounts set up with ING: House Down Payment, Car Repairs/Down Payment, Joint Emergency Savings, Investment Savings & Vacation Savings.

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!

We haven’t posted anything here on the site about Him being out of work but he has actually been out of work since July 15th. He is in the Army and was mobilized for the past year. Luckily he was mobilized here locally so we didn’t have to deal with long distance pressures. When his orders ended he was left in a state of limbo where he didn’t know if his orders were going to be renewed and if they were when it would happen.

Financially things haven’t been that tight as he was paid through the middle of July and then was also cashed out for his remaining vacation time and was also still owed two reimbursement checks for housing. UNfortunately we still haven’t received all of the payments owed to us but we did manage to squeeze by without having to put anything on the credit cards or dip into our savings.

We decided to look at other employment options for Him. I work as a Defense Contractor (like a large portion of the professional population in the Washington DC metro area) and we decided that maybe moving from the Government side so the contractor side might not be such a bad idea. So fast forward a couple weeks to today and he has received and accepted a job offer to be a contractor doing almost the same exact job as he was doing before and today is his first day!

He will still be part of the National Guard and will work his one weekend a month and of course could possibly be deployed in the future but for now he will go to work M-F like the rest of this town in a shirt and tie.

Over the next week we will be looking at how to merge His paycheck and retirement savings into our overall financial picture and will keep everyone updated.

Well, we have been on a long hiatus for the last few weeks. It all started when I embarked on my eighteen day vacation from work. Yes, eighteen day of glorious non-working hours! I really hadn’t had a real vacation ever since I had started my new job almost a year ago so I was definitely due.

Our vacation was kicked off by a 4th of July party with a bunch of friends. One of our friends was house / dig sitting at a house that had a great backyard so our partying started off there with a great big potluck BBQ. Two of the guests were visiting from the UK and volunteers to whip up some great homemade Indian food. My favorite was a great Tandoori chicken dish.

After feasting for what seemed like hours and consuming a few adult beverages we headed on over to our building to watch the Washington DC fireworks. Our building has an unobstructed view of the Capital Building from the roof. There’s a pool, hot tub and huge lounge up on the top floor and the staff was pulling out all the stops to throw a big fireworks viewing party. Unfortunately the rain moved in along with the clouds and the fireworks were kind of a bust this year. We’ll hope for better next year.

The whole 4th of July weekend took up the first few days of our vacation and before we knew it , it was time to start packing a getting ready to jet off to Jamaica.

Programming note: Over the next week I will try to catch everyone up on our vacation time and bring it back to the present.

Well, I will start by apologizing for our lack of posts for the past week. It’s not that we were extra-ordinarily busy or anything, we just got busy with other “stuff”. If you remember in an earlier post we discontinued our gym membership since HIS can use the gym at work for free, I now walk to work (2 miles a day round trip) and we both can use the small gym in our apartment building for free.

Well, I have had absolutely no motivation recently to work out at all. I have only walked to work a few times a week due to some extremely hot weather and rain. So, in order to fight the battle of the bulge and get ready for our upcoming week long trip to Jamaica (YAY!) I have decided to look for a group activity that I can participate in to get some exercise.

I’m leaning towards a group activity so it will help keep my attention as well as the opportunity to meet some new people. In the past I have tried a soccer league which got a thumbs down due to the timing of the practices and games which were just too late at night. I’m totally not interested in softball no matter how many people ask me to play. I used to row crew in college and I think it will be my next sport to try. I’m hoping it’s like riding a bicycle and comes back to me easily.

Living in the Washington DC area we have access to a number of rowing clubs at a variety of costs, some of which I think are more than reasonable. I’ll write more after I give one or two of them a try.

It’s better late than never and so I present to you my updated net worth for April courtesy of both NetworthIQ and Zoho.

As you can see, things are going well in terms of paying down the debt. That’s my biggest goal right now and then I’ll really step things up in terms of savings and retirement. Hers and I have set up a new budget for after we combine our finances and we’ve built in a pretty ambitious savings plan that I feel we’ll be able to stick with.

Well things are starting to look a little better around here. At least if you’re using any web browser except for IE6. For those of you that haven’t upgraded yet, there will be a few issues on this site because of the CSS code that I’m using. I’ve test in IE7, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. They all handle it well and I’m confidant that most of the people who will be visiting should get the correct look.

We’re not using much in the way of images so hopefully everything will load pretty quickly. However, if you are having any problems, please let me know and I’ll try to correct them.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming!