Goal Update for July (and June, since I missed it!)

I’m not quite sure why, but I never did a goal post in June. Weird. I’m here with one for July, albeit a little late.

My May update is here and if you’d like to see the original post, just click here.

Cereal Avoidance

We’re doing fairly well with this despite the warm weather. Zoe and I have been eating copious amounts of granola (which is really delicious topped with strawberries or blueberries) and the other kids have been mostly eating bagels or toast. Thanks to the abundant summer produce that’s now available, we’ve also been eating cantaloupe, berries, and other fruits with our breakfast.

We’re still eat eating some cereal, but it’s definitely not an every day thing like it used to be.

Quicken

I’ve had success on this front in the last month. I simplified and organized my files a bit, and I’ve been managing to stay on top of them.

Summer Savings

If you remember, I hadn’t saved up as much as I’d planned (this money was to make up for my lower summertime piano teaching income). However, I’m pleased to report that we didn’t even need to tap into that account in June, and we won’t need to in July either. I’m kinda thinking we’ll be fine in August too, which is delightful news. So, that means I’ve got $423 extra in savings. I might put that into a camera lens fund. 😉

Emergency Fund

Speaking of savings, our emergency fund efforts have paid off in a big way. According to my calculations, by the end of this month we should have 5 months worth of expenses saved up. (In case you missed it, a few months back, I calculated how much money we’d need to live on if we both lost our jobs, and I figured that by living very frugally, we could get by on $2400 a month. So, that’s how I calculate how far our savings would take us.)

I’m really, really happy about this. Back in January, I was hoping to maybe get three month’s worth of expenses saved by the end of the year, and thankfully, we’ve exceeded that goal already.

Since we’re doing so well with this goal, I’m going to relax a bit with my grocery budget and bump it back up to $100 a week. I probably will still aim for $80, but it’ll be nice to have a bit more wiggle room.

For the entirety of our marriage, we’ve always wanted to have a good emergency savings, but we kept having emergencies (like the death of a heat pump) that depleted our fund once we had a couple thousand saved. This is the first time we’ve actually managed to get nicely sized fund going, so this is uncharted territory for us!

I suppose that my husband and I will need to have a chat about where we want to go from here. I’m guessing that we’ll keep adding to our emergency fund until we have 6 month’s worth of expenses, and I know that after that one of our goals will be to save up enough money to buy our next car with cash. We’ll see, though…you never know when an emergency will come along and deplete our savings!