Step 7, Step 8 and Step 9

on Thursday, April 9, 2009

First let me say, I have not been doing this every day as I should be. Life gets in the way and I do not always have time to do these things. I should make more of an attempt to work on things that I say I'm going to work on. I still haven't posted my introduction to my 101 things in 1001 days yet. That will come this Sunday with an update post. Now on to the business at hand...

Step seven is about figuring out income for a month. During most months I receive two paychecks. Each paycheck works out to about $630 which makes my monthly take home pay about $1260. I do receive a check for transportation reimbursement which usually works out to an extra $20 or so. I use this for fun money or extra gas money if I run over. When S starts work again he should be bringing home just about the same amount of money. We should have about $2400 per month to work with.

Step eight is dealing with net worth. I calculate our net worth each month on the sidebar. Have a look <----. It is not entirely accurate since it does not include S's bank accounts but it does include his debts. So in reality our net worth is slightly higher. I will continue to do this monthly.

Step nine is a debt test. I took the test and answered yes to some of the questions. At the end, it says if you answered yes to any of these questions debt pay off needs to be a priority. The two questions that I answered yes to honestly have nothing to do with debt pay off. One ask if our e-fund is inadequate. I answered yes because it is not where we'd like it to be. This is not because we have debt. It is because we used our savings for a wedding. The second question I answered yes to also has to do with savings. It says if I lost my job would we be in financial strain immediately. Yes we would because our savings is inadequate again not because we are in debt. Over all, on the questions related to debt I answered no which would make us pass with flying colors. I know we need to work on savings and that is going to be our next priority.

Ok, I am all caught up with this. I really should work on the next few steps as I'm going out of town for the weekend but I will do them when I return. As of right now, I'm not finding this a good way to get on track financially. We'll see how the rest of the days play out.

-M

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