Vacation in Will Fly For Food

Vacation was great. I had a ton of fun, saw some neat stuff, laughed a lot and drank a little. I miss flying. :(. Also, I had to endure the Spanish Inquisition from N's relatives about when we plan to have kids. Ugh.

I haven't said much of anything on here because of my anti-internet funk lately. I feel like I really don't have much interesting to say. I work a lot. Everyone I know only wants to talk about their kids which means we have zero things in common. (it's ok, I like your kids, really).

I've started the long and tedious process of cleaning out the apartment. Everything is ready to go on the house, all the paperwork is completed and ready for signatures. What isn't ready is the fucking appraisal. There is like ONE person in the area who does appraisals, so the waiting list is 6 weeks long. They aren't even sure they can get it done before we close . It's like are you people for real? How hard is it to look at house and say " that price is ok." Or "that price is not ok." Since we are buying a foreclosure the price is low, so I'm not concerned about that. But it still needs to get done. Ugh.

We also reached our goal for saving the first week of August. We plan to keep saving through the end of the year so we have a larger emergency fund in place, just because our "starter/baby step" emergency fund we following Dave Ramsey's plan just doesn't seem big enough for owning a house. Then it will be back to the debt snowball.

I still feel like we've made excellent progress and my monthly expenses keep getting smaller and my excess, which is being funneled into house emergency fund now, is growing each month. I'm finding that I am not scraping to meet my 1,000 per month contribution. Instead, I'm meeting it and have been putting even more in for the last 2 months. We paid off all our credit cards and a few student loans so far, cash flowed a house down payment, cash flowed Oshkosh vacation, and are still moving forward.

We are feeling happy, optimistic, hopeful. Like our lives are in our hands now and we are calling the shots. It's a great feeling.

The turning point for me has really been taking on this part time job. I wouldn't have been able to make the progress we've made without bumping up my income somehow. And although I truly wish I could get a decent job that paid a decent living wage , that isn't the case around here despite my best efforts. Instead 2 ok jobs will have to do.