Goal update(or, My how a month flies by!)

I can’t believe it’s been a month since I did an update on this. I’m actually a wee bit early this month for a change! (by the way, those of you that are new around these parts may want to catch up by checking out my original goals post. )

1) Cereal avoidance

The non-cereal breakfasts thing is still going well, although I’ve stepped my efforts there up a notch in order to cut down my grocery spending further(more on that later). We’re definitely eating more than three non-cereal breakfasts a week, though.

2) Quicken

I’m doing fairly well at keeping Quicken updated…in fact, I think all of my accounts are up-to-date. That hasn’t happened in, um, a really long time. Ahem.

3) Summer Savings

I’ve got $372 in that account at the moment, so barring a miracle, I’m likely not going to reach my $1000 goal by summertime. However, I’m not actually too concerned about that, because I think that I will be able to get at least a few photography sessions in each month in the summer. I sent out a teeny bit of advertising a couple of weeks ago, and I already have three photo sessions lined up for April. I think this could work out very nicely…my piano teaching income goes down in the summertime, and summertime is perfect for taking pictures(people are off of school, it’s warm enough to take outside pictures(I don’t have a studio!), and it stays light into the evening. So, I should be able to supplement my piano income with photography income during the summer, and then in the winter when the weather is not so picture-friendly, my piano income will go back up to its normal level.

4) Emergency Fund

Last month I’d hoped to have a better update on our emergency fund situation, and I do! Our federal income tax refund has arrived, and our state refund should be here soon. So, how close are we to my goal of 3-6 months? If we had to, we could live on about $2370 a month(I’ll probably post our barebones budget at some point), so we currently could survive for 2.69 months on our savings(to be exact!). That’s not too far from the lower end of my goal, but we’ve decided that we would really like to kick up our emergency savings efforts over the next few months.

To that end, I’m working even harder at reducing our grocery bill(I was $20 under for the last two weeks), and we’re trying extra hard to avoid spending money when it’s not necessary(not that we fritter away much of our money even under normal circumstances!). And happily, I’ve been blessed to get a few freelance type of jobs last month and there are some coming up this month too(some piano-playing gigs, and the aforementioned photography sessions). All of that extra money will be going straight into our emergency fund.

I’m interested to see how much extra money we can squirrel away by buckling down for several months, and of course, I’ll be faithful to update you all each month. 😉