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Progress on savings and other updates

May 15th, 2014 at 04:33 pm

Well, I think I'll wait to update my sidebar info until this weird problem gets solved!

The transfer to savings I did yesterday showed up in the account. I needn't have worried about overdrawing my checking; it hasn't even been taken out of checking yet and it's already in savings! That's $2500 straight to the renovate & move fund.

Also, when we bought a number of paint samples and brushes on Tuesday ($55.93), I was able to cashflow with some money I realized didn't need to be sitting in checking, so that goes toward the $13,500 budgeted for renovations without being actually taken out of the money we've saved so far.

This takes our savings to almost $40,000 and reduces what we still need to save (in the event the land deal doesn't go through) to less than $30,000.

Messaged with my friend we're considering sharing a duplex with last night, and we agreed that we need to just start looking at some to see if that's even feasible. (The main reason my family wants to move is because we want a lot more space -- at least three more rooms' worth -- so if we can't get that in a duplex, that option is going to have to come off the table.)

So I moved the meeting with our realtor up to this Sunday, and I'm going to talk to her about getting a showing of three duplexes that are clustered together in a nearby neighborhood. They have varying amounts of space and levels of disrepair (and the prices vary by more than $100K), so we feel like this would give us a good idea of whether it's likely that we could find a duplex where one of the units could satisfy my family.

We're just $70 away from earning the Discover reward and about $1400 from earning the Southwest Visa one. I said it out loud last night and I'm writing it down here in an attempt to follow through: After these two rewards are earned, I'm going to stop doing the credit card churn until after we're settled in a new home. I don't want our credit report to look any crazier than it already does. Our scores are all in the very high 700s, so hopefully it won't harm our attempt to qualify for a mortgage, but I don't want to push our luck any more than we have!

So once these two cards are spent up and rewards received, we cancel them. The cards we keep, I'm going to add all of us to, so we can all use them for the intended purposes. These are the cards we intend to keep:
Chase Freedom (Just until we get our mortgage, since this is the longest-open card)
American Express (for 6% grocery rewards)
Target RedCard (for 5% Target rewards)
Amazon.com card (for 5% Amazon rewards)
USBank Visa (for 2-5% rewards in various other categories)

After we close on a house, I'll cancel the Chase Freedom and we'll just have 4 permanent cards with all 3 of us on every account.

I have been trying to organize my thoughts for a post on my other blog, ordinarysavers.com, but I feel like my own finances (at least the way I think about them) have been in such flux for the past few months, I'm not really sure how to write about money right now. But I think I'm starting to conceptualize a post about how to let go of priorities temporarily but try to do it responsibly.

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