Thanks for visiting Ultimate Money Blog! If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. The other day I asked the question: “How much money do you make?“.  That post got a lot of responses from many people who were comfortable sharing how much their annual salaries are.  I think overall more people were comfortable sharing their finances with other people than not.  I thought it would be fun for anyone that wanted to share their salary to do so here.  I’m going to allow anonymous comments so that no one has to be public with their money if they don’t want to be.  And for the people that don’t feel comfortable with everyone knowing their business, they can comment anonymously and share without revealing their identity. I’ll have to approve comments manually, so if you do comment with anonymous it most likely will go into moderation and I’ll be sure to approve it as soon as I can.  If you want to play along, please comment with: -Your annual base salary. -What state or area [...]

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 [...]