Report on my goals, the second edition

I just realized today that it’s March, which means that I’m due to update on my goals again. You can read the original goal post here.

1) I’d like for the kids and me to eat three non-cereal breakfasts per week.

We’re actually doing even better with this than we were last month. I ate maybe 5 bowls of cold cereal over the whole month of February, so I’m pretty pleased with that. In addition, Joshua has started eating oatmeal sometimes. The girls were all eating it last month, but he was sort of slow to come around to the idea.

At any rate, I’m hardly having to buy any cereal at all, which is saving me money and also is keeping me from having to spend time and effort looking for coupons and sales on cereal.

2) I’d like to save up an emergency fund that is equivalent to 3-6 months of living expenses by the end of the year.

We have over $2000 in that account, but we still haven’t made any further progress on this because we haven’t gotten to file our taxes yet. I’m waiting on one last document, and then we can hopefully get them sent off. We should have between $400 and $500 leftover at the end of this month, but we probably will have to spend that on car maintenance instead of putting it into the emergency savings account.

Thankfully, we haven’t had to use our emergency savings at all, and so the money is just sitting in there earning interest($30 so far).

If all goes well, perhaps we’ll have our tax return by this time next month, and I’ll have a happy new emergency savings report.

3)I’d like to be more disciplined about keeping Quicken updated.

Like last month, I’m not exactly rocking on this goal, but I have made some improvements. Before, it wasn’t that unusual for Quicken to collect dust for a couple of months(I know…I should be ashamed), and I’ve been doing much better than that lately.

4)I’d like to save up some money to use this summer.

I’ve made some progress there…I want to have $1000 saved up by June 1st, and right now I have $321. At this rate, though, I’m only going to have $421 saved by summer. So, I’m going to try to figure out some way to speed up the savings there.

I’ve been thinking about trying to maybe drum up a little bit of photography business to help out with that, and oddly enough, on Sunday I got asked to do a portrait session for a couple who is getting married soon. Hopefully the weather will cooperate so that we can do that this month, and maybe a couple of other photography jobs will come my way.

I’m not going to stress terribly over this, though. We’ve made it through many a summer before without any extra savings, so anything I save before June will feel like a bit of a luxury. And next year I will hopefully get more of a head start on saving money for this purpose.