We are already over three months into 2011, and I can’t believe it.  A quarter of the year is over already!  That’s nuts.  I thought I’d do a review of how our 2011 goals are going so far. 1. Keep up with the clutter and declutter 365 items from our house this year. We’re doing well on this challenge so far.  I’d say we are more than halfway there, and I’m very excited for that! It feels good to get rid of things.  Coincidentally, the Veterans of America pickup service was scheduled to come to our house today but never showed up. Humph. I’m not too happy about it because now I have a pile of crap sitting on my front porch that now I have to deal with. 2. Pay at least $3,000 down on the principal of our mortgage. So far we’ve paid $961.94 towards the principal of the mortgage.  We’re almost 1/3 of the way there, so I’d say we’re on track to meet this goal.  If we aren’t on track by the end of the year, [...]

Every year we set financial goals for us.  Here are the goals I set for 2010, and here are the 2009 financial goals.  Personally I think this year was a pretty good year for us financially, and I am very thankful for that.  Here’s a recap of the goals I set and whether or not we accomplished them. 1. Mortgage- This year I’d like to pay off at least $3,500 off the principal of my mortgage.  Last year I aimed for making one extra payment a year and that didn’t work out. Fail.  We paid off $2500 in principal on the mortgage this year.  This is definitely more than we would have paid off if we had just made regular payments.  About halfway through the year, I decided that I would make at least one $100 extra principal only payment on the mortgage each month.  While it’s not a lot, it still helps.  I like seeing the balance of the mortgage go down faster than normal!  Unfortunately, the mortgage that we refinanced to has a prepayment penalty of 1%.  We [...]

I decided today that I was going to calculate my net worth because I had never done so. I was surprisingly astonished when I received a net worth of $37,337! This took into consideration myself and my husband’s information, but I was really expecting to be in the red! To explain our financial situation a little deeper, I am still in my early 20s and my husband is in his early 30s. We both make a decent income for the area of the country we live in. In fact, we earn almost twice more than the median average household income for our state. We own our own house, have a first and second mortgage, both have Roth IRAs, I have a 401K, and we’ve got a nice chunk of savings kept in a high yield savings account at ING. We both work full time as managers in our respective fields, I work in finance, and he works in the food industry. I was pretty shocked to see the number come up that was displayed. We’ve had a little bit of [...]