It's been such a mentally draining couple of weeks that I didn't remember to check AS's student loan until I realized the payment had posted! $133 went to principal, taking April debt repayment to $921. That surpasses the $900 goal.

It also takes our student loan debt (when we round off the cents) to $11,000 even!

Now that we've decided to put a laser focus on saving for a home, I've had to put my extra debt repayment on hold. So $133 per month is all we're going to see the student loans go down for a while. My spreadsheet says it would take 6.89 years to pay it off at that rate, so let's hope I'm able to start putting extra money to it again before that!

On that front, I decided to close a checking account and savings account that were earning little to no interest. Their only purpose was to keep EF funds separate from house savings, but I can do that on a spreadsheet and have everything in one account at least earning .9%. Plus, if we have to temporarily deplete the EF and medical fund, I'm willing to do that to get to our goal faster. So for the time being, I'm thinking of all our cash savings as one lump sum. Kind of exciting to see it all together: $21,022.75! And that's not counting our UK savings (which will definitely be temporarily depleted to pay for renovations over there).

We also agreed to halt travel and charitable spending for the next 10 months or so in order to save up enough for a down payment. We think that, supposing the windfall doesn't come, we'll have enough for renovations plus down payment by March of next year. That's assuming (as always) no unexpected windfalls OR curveballs. So could be sooner or later than that.

The declutter challenge has gone pffft! As sometimes happens with these things, I plan a challenge and then get hit by some unexpected things that take my attention away from it. That's OK; challenges are good for motivating me when there's nothing going on, but if something more urgent or important comes along, I'll focus on that instead. The things that have come up:
- Lots of extra work that sometimes leads to OT at home
- Our decision to stay in the US
- Seeming movement on the land deal (which still hasn't led to anything, but did cause a flurry of house-hunting when it looked like it was going through)
- A round of spring colds that have kept our household energy at half-mast

Anyway, time to revamp the sidebar goals once again!