The major most sucky thing about being an adult is how unnecessarily fast time flies. I swear it was just Christmas and now look at us…. it’s June people! What are we doing with our lives?!
Well, I don’t know what you’ve been doing but I paid off some debt this month! Actually, looking back on May as a whole, it was one of our best months in 2019!
There was some major hustle that went into making this possible. Please… follow me down yet another budgetary rabbit hole as I pick apart the last months financials.
Debt Paydown
If you follow me on Instagram you may have seen my goal for this month was to pay off our remaining $1,400 of credit card debt. That was a HUGE goal to even think about throwing out into the world, but I set it anyway!
The thing with making a big goal like that is, even if you fall short you still succeeded. It’s setting the mentality of having a goal and staying focused, even when you would rather take that money to the mall and spend your feelings away.
So, we fell short of $1,400 but succeeded in killing $660 worth of credit card debt.
That’s insane to me.
That is the culmination of so much hustle, hard work, and planning. It’s eating dinners in and packing snacks and lunches nearly every day so we could keep ourselves on budget. We hit some serious rough patches this month and weathered them without using a credit card.
I love that feeling when you made a plan and the plan WORKED! Imagine me doing cartwheels, because that is what my soul is doing.
Surprise Expenses
This month brought some very unexpected surprise expenses. Registration costs for Nic’s new car as well as property taxes on both vehicles.
Technically, none of these things should have been a surprise because we deal with this every single year. Unfortunately for me, I forgot to budget for these in 2019… however, 2020 will be a different story.
These surprises cost us about an extra $600 we hadn’t truly planned on. So how pleased was I that I had spent the last few months accumulating a small cushion in our checking account. It was an accidental cushion at first but since we still have unexpected things pop up from month to month I left it and let it grow a bit.
Go me. That was a timely decision and now that the cushion is gone I have started replenishing it for the next time I miss something obvious.
If you want some tips on building a cushion I have a post on it you should definitely check out.
Sinking Funds and Savings
Here is something new that I worked on in the month of May, I didn’t save money out of each paycheck specifically for sinking funds. *gasp*
From December through April I had been a dedicated believer in sending money to savings with each and every check.
every.single.check.
This month I switched it up. I noticed that we weren’t quite making ends meet with the money I was allocating in certain weeks. There were actually a few times we had to dip into savings and then pay it back from later paychecks. It was pretty annoying.
So, here’s the change I made. I started looking ahead at my week and making note of any upcoming events or possibilities that could mean extra money spent. Then I budgeted us a little extra spending money to cushion those events. Some weeks we needed less and others we needed a little more. At the end of the month once all our bills had been paid we had an extra $700 to throw into savings or sinking funds.
Since we’re still building our emergency fund a little as well as filling our sinking funds I was able to divide that and send half to each account.
It felt magical and so much less stressful than the other way.
Final Numbers and Side Hustle Totals
So a quick recap of where that extra money ended up going:
- $350 to Emergency Fund Savings
- $350 to Sinking Funds
- $660 to Debt Snowball
That Debt Snowball was fully funded by side hustle work, none of it came from our earned income. Shout out to Uber and Lyft for being one of the easiest side hustles around! I also have a second side hustle where I assist a friend who owns their own business with technical support services. It’s my favorite hustle working with one of my favorite people and life just can’t get better than that!
That’s the run down of this month. Not so short but definitely sweet, I hope you enjoyed it!
If you liked this post and want to follow along, I highly recommend heading on over to my Instagram which is even more fun.
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