Success: Spent the last 14 months paying down credit cards and now are down to only 2 cards and all balances are on 0% deals. We also built up a $4K emergency fund.

2009 Goals: I got laid off in Dec 2008 so #1 is to find a job. Even if I find a job in the near future, my husband and I plan to try to reduce our expenses to live off of only his paycheck (we are about $800/month too high right now). Also build up the emergency fund considerably more!

Since he owns his own business, he gets steady paychecks but they don’t always come at a set time (e.g. every two weeks, like mine). It comes to a full salary by year’s end, but during the year, I’ve learned that my paycheck is for the bills, mortage, student loans, etc., and for the past 4 months straight, his entire paycheck, whenever it comes for the month, has gone straight into savings. It’s the only way we were able to do this. It’s become almost a game, to see how well we can save!

I guess my recent success has been that I got a raise. I feel a little sad because I know several people that have lost their jobs or taken a pay cut, but I am extremely grateful that I was not among them. I put that raise towards my 401(k).

Well it turns out the other person didn’t think he/she could sell their home in the weak market and didn’t want to relocate and take the job. They called my husband and we jumped on it. We didn’t worry about selling our home because it was an inexpensive home that’d we’d just never decided to move out of. The increase in pay and benefits from the new job more than offsets the cost of owning two homes. In other words because we had an overinflated emergency fund (I’m conservative) and had lived beneath our means we were ready to jump on a good offer even as the economy was tanking.

Now we are settled. We still own two homes, but are having no problems because our emergency fund, low debt, and good credit have allowed us to ride this tide in. We’re still able to save money each month and not tap our emergency fund. Once our house sells (and it will) then we’ll have that much more money each month. But we were able to take advantage of an excellent opportunity because we had the low overhead to do so.

budget: done
emergency fund: fully funded
debt: don’t have any

This year I hope to continue on last year’s successes, start saving for retirement and land a new much better paying job (economy willing).

I have zero-dollar credit card balance! That’s the first time I’ve been able to say that in over ten years!!!

A side note: Before you go through the hassle of splitting a CD into non-laddered chunks, ask your bank if you can withdraw part of the CD in an emergency. We use a small, local bank that allows us to pull any amount out of a CD before maturity, and we only pay the interest penalty on the amount withdrawn.

Thanks!

Thanks for the knowledge.