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Home > Archive: October, 2008

Archive for October, 2008

Sept – the worst month for the year...

October 7th, 2008 at 04:44 am

Yeah, it was the worst month for our $20K challenge. Here’s the quick synopsis of Sept spending:
Good: Home Phone was a bit lower than usual. Allowances were not too bad. Even Entertainment spending wasn’t even that bad.
Bad: Utility bills all come at once (but at least we won’t have to worry about them in Oct). Grocery bill was a bit over but most of the grocery I did at the end of Sept is being used for this month. Also spent some money on clothing, most of it was necessary.
Our challenge is not looking very good at the moment but I guess, even though we spent over $2,200 for the month it wasn’t really for things that were not necessary.



The problem now for us is that the weather is getting warmer and everyone is celebrating something, which means more spending on restaurants and gifts. At least these are things we value so I don’t mind spending money on this stuff. But as always it’s a constant balance not to go overboard. There are a lot of long-term goals that we want to achieve, and they can only be done if we start saving as much as we can now. But yeah we still also want to live a good life now while we are young.

So even though Sept was the worst month so far this year we still managed to put away some saving and also managed to fully fund the tuition fund and put an extra $600 to the car fund.

I also have looked at our 3rd quarter net worth, amazingly, it actually went up by about 9% most of it from cash and increase in house value. Also our stocks actually have gone up too. I bought 2 stocks about 2 months ago, 1 is up and the other is down. Both of them paid dividend late last month. So all up despite how the market is, it’s not too bad. Most of the decrease is the money in our retirement funds. Oh well it has 30 years or so to recover.