Nate and Danielle discuss their budgeting goals for the year as well as discuss their recent change of banks and the reasons for making some other recent changes to household finances.
Show Notes
New Year’s Resolutions:
- Make our money work more – We have been hoarding a lot in checking and savings because there’s been a lot of unknowns with home reno, the govt shutdown, my work travel, and changes to the tax code. While it’s sometimes good to hoard when you have something coming up (like a child on the way), it can also paralyze growth. It’s stopping us from putting extra into our home loans. In reality we have a big enough crash fund to handle the unknown (we bolstered it a little), so our money should be making more for us elsewhere.
- Pay down 2nd mortgage (currently owe 22K, would like to get it down to 5K)
- Continue to stay on budget – It’s been a back and forth year with our ability to stick to a budget, but we’ve been pretty good the last couple months, so we’re hoping to stick with it. The one thing we haven’t been good at is putting aside a set amount of money each month to spread the cost of misc. expenses like insurance and vet bills.
- Put more into retirement – I would like to be putting a little more in my work 401K. It’s sometimes hard to decide whether we should put all extra money toward debt or balance between more retirement savings.
- Learn more about investment and the stock market
- Donate more
- Make videos to go along with our podcast
Emphasizing the need for crash fund – shutdown fiasco
Switching banks:
Capital One because they offered a 2% APY (annual percentage yield) savings account, with BOA we were only make like .2%.