I paid the portion of NT's tuition that we didn't take out a loan for. As many of you already know, when I started my journey out of debt, I added $40,000 of "estimated future debt" to our debt load. I knew NT needed to get a college degree, so I picked that as the max we would borrow. I didn't want it to hurt our debt progress when we took out loans, so I added it in before we'd actually borrowed it.

By cashflowing part of this semester, we saved having to take out that amount as a student loan, so I subtract that from our "estimated future debt."

We paid $1278, so that makes it $2,101 toward the September debt repayment goal, or $20 more than our month's goal!

Looking ahead, I can see that this degree is going to cost us more than $40,000. So at a certain point, the "estimated future debt" category will be gone, and we'll just have to cashflow it all to make sure we don't borrow, but it will mean slower reduction of our total household debt. But I'm confident we'll be in a good place to do so.

I'm going to lay out a long-term strategy at the end of this year for how I'm going to try and reach all my financial goals listed in the sidebar by 2016. I'll be sure to add the extra money I think I'll need for NT to complete his degree.

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Doing well on the no-eating-out challenge! I haven't even bought extra treats while grocery shopping, which is tempting when I know I'm not allowed.

Sept. 14: success.
Sept. 15: success.

That takes me to 13 out of 15 successful days. Not like I eat out a ton regularly anyway, but this is a pretty good record for me! Tuesday I'll get drinks out, but I'll try to keep it to one. Other than that, I don't see too many strong temptations ahead of me this month. So hopefully I'll be able to buy a few key items for my winter wardrobe soon!

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I challenged us to stay within $100 for the week's groceries. With diapers and formula, we'll be about $19 over that. And we have a couple bucks' worth of items that we didn't realize we needed. But, if we hadn't had to stock up on those, we'd be about $30 under budget! So I'm still proud of us. We can look forward to a time when we don't have to buy diapers or formula, and we'll be used to constraining our grocery shopping, so it'll hopefully be easy to stay within budget.

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Some random good money news:

AS was working remotely at a coffee shop downtown on Friday. I overheard a project manager saying we could use an editor with Chicago style knowledge for a few hours. So I asked AS if she could put off some of her regular work and do it over the weekend, and she said yes! She ended up working 4.5 hours at $55 per hour! This will go straight into the moving fund when we get it, nearly $250. I'm proud of her for stepping in with no notice to contribute to the fund.

Our healthcare situation straightened out, faster than I thought it would! SL's healthcare was taken out of my paycheck and NT's check was back to normal. So that was about $40 I wasn't anticipating, PLUS my paycheck was nearly $10 more than I'd estimated, so that's about $20 per month more that we can put toward our goals.

NT is finding his Net10 phone plan doesn't work because he has tons of minutes left over each month, but he has to add more every 2 months to keep his number active. So I contacted T-Mobile to see if I could start a third prepaid plan for our household (I'd read somewhere there was a limit of 2) and they said it was OK.

NT just refilled, so we'll use his phone as much as possible for the next 2 months and then switch him to T-Mobile. There will be an initial outlay to buy a T-Mobile phone and 1000 minutes, but in the long run this should lower our monthly costs. And he'll have more flexibility and not have to refill at a certain time (1000 minutes with T-Mobile buys you a year of activation).