Quick edit to July results; just to post some kind of progress on the medical EF, I checked my savings account and counted the 26 cents interest earned there. Whew!

Well, our August debt-repayment goal is going to be a relatively modest $1750, because while part of NT's tuition payment will wipe out "estimated future debt," that category will then be gone. There's only about $800 left in it, so the rest of the $2500 payment will go toward big-picture progress but won't reduce our debt total. Any tuition we pay after that last $800 is what NT's college will be costing above and beyond the $40K I estimated when he started the journey.

Anyway, once that's gone, our debt total will be our true and actual debt total. And hopefully it'll never go up unless we buy a house that costs more than our current mortgages!

The big-picture benchmark for August is $17,896; we're already at $22,966.25, so well past where we need to be. And the tuition payment should push us past the $25K mark this month!

Now on to groceries ... we actually had money left over at the end of the first July period (1st to 15th), so we had over $375 to get us through the second half of July, plus full boxes of CSA veggies every week. Yet somehow we piddled it all away and now have $12 left. I mean, at least we didn't go over our limit, but these months of summer CSA bounty are meant to be the ones where we spend less and get ahead a little so that winter months (where we have to buy produce out of pocket, out of season) are easier. We're using fewer diapers, we don't buy formula -- I'm not really sure where it went! The only reason we didn't go over is I made a menu for this week that mainly relies on CSA veg and pantry staples, so we only spent about $60. That means the week and a half before, we must have spent over $300! I could go through our credit card statements and figure out where it went, but the main thing is, it's gone, and we need to do better in August.

We do pretty well on the weekend shop, but I think one-off purchases to fill gaps during the week, and purchases of sporadic household maintenance/grooming needs, really kill us. I'm thinking about calculating how much we have for each week and divvying it up that way, so we know what our "absolute" limit is each week. Except, I'd need to figure out how much MORE we'll need in non-CSA months, and that gets kind of confusing. If I divide our annual fee by the number of weeks we actually receive boxes, it's about $31 per week. So maybe I should figure out how to allocate $30 more per week in non-CSA times than during CSA times. This is going to take some calculating!