In one of our last blog posts I mentioned that we were entering stork mode while pregnant and pausing our debt snowball. You can read more about stork mode via Dave Ramsey here. Well, we are a few months into pausing the snowball and boy is it ridiculously harder than I thought it was going to be! Oh, don’t throw everything you can at debt and just put it in savings, no problem! Haha, no.
What We’re Doing
Our shovel so to speak is not large by any means, a couple hundred dollars a month if we are lucky. So, it’s not like I could clear an entire debt at the moment. Just having it sit there and not really go towards anything is frustrating for me. Maybe it’s all in my head? Who knows. Either way, it kinda sucks. It’s also slightly cool to know that I have about four more months to grow it. Then, we will chuck it at the smallest debt.
In the meantime I am reviewing our budget every month to see where we can tweak things. This is something I do every month, but I am a bit crazier with it right now. As in slightly more strict. I am trying to convince Aaron to get a prepaid re-loadable card for the gas budget, that way we can really hunker down on that. He doesn’t want to have that much cash just in his wallet or in the house, so we are still using debit for that. Hopefully I can wear him down before Wildbaby gets here lol.
I am strongly considering cancelling all of our streaming services as well. With Disney+ coming out, do we really need the others at the moment? We will be so busy watching all the new Marvel and Star Wars content that I doubt we will touch anything else. Besides, with the kids it’s a heck of a lot better than Hulu or Netflix.
Canceling our streaming services would allow us to put more into our stork fund/eventual medium-ish debt payment, but it might suck for the winter and the postpartum period so that is definitely an on going discussion.
Holidays
Another thing making this slightly difficult is the upcoming holidays. It’s definitely not any sort of excuse and we will stay on the debt free journey, but our savings for it is a lot smaller than I was planning because this pregnancy was a bit of a surprise. Basically, we are saving for baby and the holidays at this point.
I know the boys will understand that the gift pile will be a little smaller from us, but dang that Mom guilt is something fierce. The kids get a ton of toys though, especially the oldest because he has a whole other family at his Mom’s house. They don’t need a whole bunch of toys anyway! Seriously, we don’t need more clutter in this house. I clean enough as it is!
Basically, we are up to a whole lot of nothing around these parts. Just saving, saving, saving and planning for the arrival of Wildbaby. We are still shocked it’s a girl by the way!
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