Our Financial Goals

I follow a lot of frugal blogs. Really. A lot. Saving money is my passion, and I love to see what others have to say about it. Recently, I’ve ready quite a few “financial goals” posts, so I thought I’d share some of our financial goals.

First, I’ve never had credit card debt. Never. I have had a credit card for almost 10 years, but I’ve only carried a balance once. (I underpaid my balance by $.25 once. How? I have NO idea. But I carried a $.25 balance for 1 month about 6 years ago). Anyway, the one thing that I see many people striving for is to eliminate their credit card debt. I’m so happy to say we don’t have any! And yes, we use our credit cards! I know, all the Dave Ramsey fans are wagging their fingers at me in disgust. Perhaps some time I will post why I don’t think credit cards are evil, but that is a discussion for another day.

We also don’t have car payments. Neither of our cars were financed. Hubby paid cash for his, and mine was a very generous gift. Both cars are over 10 years old, but they run great, and we love them. The time is quickly approaching when we will have to replace hubby’s car, but we will pay cash for that.

I have some debt from college. Hubby never had any school debt, because he’s a genius. I had a LOT of help with my tuition, and my master’s degree is paid off. We’ve been making minimum payments on my undergrad student loan. At this rate, I think it gets paid off sometime around year 2150 or something. This loan isn’t really a priority for us, though. The interest rate is right around 2%, and the interest we pay is tax deductible. We would like to start paying more on this loan once our mortgage is paid off.

What was that? What did I just say? After our mortgage is paid off? Yes, you heard me right. Our immediate goal is to pay off our house! February of 2008, we bought our house. We put 20% down, so we aren’t paying PMI (yay! I hate PMI!). We took out a 15 year mortgage, because we didn’t want to be paying on our house forever. We make our regular payment every month, and then we make an additional payment that is actually MORE than our monthly payment. So we make 2 payments plus a little bit every month. We also hope to continue to make one large additional payment at the end of each calendar year. (We did it last December, and we hope to do it again this December!) If we can continue at our current rate, we’ll have our house paid off in less than 5 years. How amazing would that be? We’d have our house paid off before I turn 30. This is our immediate goal, and we are so excited about it. So far, so good.

The one other thing I hear about a lot is an emergency fund. I’m not really sure if we have an emergency fund. I put a portion of our income into a savings account each pay period. I have no idea how many month’s of expenses it would cover at the moment. I should probably figure that out. I hear that you should have about 6 month’s worth of expenses. This should probably be more of a priority for us than it has been.

Anyway, that’s an overview of what we’d like to accomplish with our money. What are some of our financial goals? I’d love to hear about them!