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Archive for January, 2017

This and That

January 25th, 2017 at 09:23 am

Gardening – I have not done much with the veggie garden this summer. I just did not have much time but I did make sure to plant some tomatoes and basils, I've got a bit of tomatoes already.

Dinner party – Saturday night we had few friends over for dinner, card games and a Netflix movie. It was a lot of fun. It increased our grocery bill this month but it would have been a lot cheaper than going out to a restaurant.

Long weekend – DH is taking Friday off and since Thursday is a public holiday (Australia Day) then he will have 4-day weekend. We are thinking of going for a day trip somewhere maybe fishing, we have not done that for couple of years.

Grocery – Our grocery budget for this year is $300 per month. So far this month we are at $260.45, half of it was spent on the weekend when we did a big shop and bought some extra stuff for the dinner party. Even though we only got $40 left for this weekend it should be plenty, I’m hoping we might not even have to spend all of it. Right now we got a lot of leftovers in the freezer and the pantry is full.

Annual bills and the Mortgage

January 18th, 2017 at 03:53 am

We just paid the Home and Car Insurance for the year all up it was $1325.09. I have always liked how we pay these couple of big expenses at the start of the year, good to get it out of the way.

This waking up at 5am on weekdays is hard getting used to. We did it 3 out of 5 last week and so far this week 1 out of 3. We got woken up by the doggy at 2am this morning and DH had problem getting back to sleep so we decided to sleep in until 7. I actually feel more tired today that I slept in. I tend to have more energy when I get up at 5 and I end up getting so much more work done. Work in progress, hopefully another month and it will get a lot easier.

DH got paid yesterday, he put another $2K into the mortgage and 2 weeks ago he paid $1200. We are currently now just under $3K. 3 more weeks it will be all gone!

Goals 2017

January 11th, 2017 at 04:10 am

My goals this year are:

Financials-
*Pay off Mortgage
*$30K into Equities
*Save $5K for Holiday money
*Save $5K for future House Repairs/Remodel

Other -
*Read 50 books - one of my goal last year, I'm hoping to actually achieve it this year.
*Workout 4 times a year (I meant a week, lol). I have been doing this for the last 3 months now, I'm hoping to keep going.
*Continue the 'no buying soft drinks' rule this year.
*Get back to blogging, at least once per week.
*Re-do landscaping in both front and back yard.
*Use floss and piksters everyday
*Wake-up before 7am. I have been trying to get up around 5am this week. This one is going to be hard one to achieve.
*Continue getting rid of "Stuff". Aim for this year is to get rid of around 10% of our stuff.
*Organise my emails.

New Year, New Start

January 4th, 2017 at 05:32 am

Hello everyone it has been almost one and a half years since I wrote an entry here. I think it's time that I come back to the blogging world. On NYE it would have been my 10 year anniversary here so I think this start of the New Year is great time to get back to blogging.

Few things have happened while I have been away here. In my last post DH just started a new job, unfortunately he only lasted 3 months at that place. The company was not a very good fit for DH, so he quit back in Sept 2015. It took him 6 months to start another job. In between those jobs we went overseas for a month. We ended up buying a land there, main reason why we went overseas. And our mortgage owing went from around $12K back up to $37K (we got a redraw account).

Last year (2016) DH got a job in late March. Since then we have been paying the mortgage back as much as we can. Our biggest expense in 2016 was replacing most of our fences. All up including getting the land surveyed it cost us $5.5K. Right now our mortgage is down to less than $7K. We are hoping to be able to pay it off by maybe end of next month. DH will have a 3 pay month (instead of 2) this month. Unfortunately, the original plan of paying the mortgage off in late 2015 (DH's 40th) didn't happen but we are still very happy about finally seeing the end of the mortgage debt.

Anyway, I aim to blog at least once a week this year as one of my goal for 2017.