This week, we’re doing an in-depth look at numbers and we’re kicking it off by taking a good, hard look at how much we spend. Annual expenditures are really the magical number needed to retire. We’re getting real (with charts!) and taking a look at 2013, 2014, and 2015. First up, 2013:
I love the beginning of the month. It’s the time to sit down, figure out where we stand on the plan, and track the numbers! Overall, this was a great month at the Banks’ house. The most exciting news? Our post about putting your kids to work was featured on Rockstar Finance! Dreams do come true! February was spent touching everything in our house and getting rid of tons of stuff. We started with organizing our clothes, moved on to purging books, tackled the bathroom and kitchen organization (and found a million bag clips and hairbands!), and then worked our way through the rest of the house.
We did it! We have successfully touched every single thing in our house. I have taken 6 loads to the thrift store. Everything left in our home has a place to go. We spent this weekend double checking all the rooms, dusting, vacuuming, changing sheets, and mopping. I can tell you that my house is really and truly cleaned and organized for the first time ever and it feels amazing. I’ve written updates on organizing clothes, books, and the bathrooms and kitchen. Tackling decluttering for real was life-changing. Here are a few things I learned along the way:
In our effort to touch every single item in our house (see our success with our clothing and our books!), we tackled the bathrooms and kitchen this past week. We anticipated these projects being quite simple since we open up all the cabinets in both the kitchen and bathrooms daily. But these projects were beasts! Every hidden corner had hairbands and bag clips! It would have been so easy to just open all the cabinets, say “yup, we’re good” and close them up again. I’m not backing down on my goal to touch every single thing, so I pulled everything out of every cabinet and wiped everything down! (It feels great to know my clean silverware is no longer sitting in a layer of year-old crumbs.) Mr. T and I actually touched and discussed every dish.
The second category we tackled was Books. We are book lovers and the books filled all our bookshelves, some storage cubes, and all the shelves in our nightstands. It was overwhelming. And it was too many to pile all together at one time. So, we broke up the process of decluttering the books in the following ways:
Step 1) Go on a Scavenger Hunt for Money Books!
I pulled up BookScouter.com on my phone and started a scavenger hunt for books worth money. BookScouter checks all the textbook buyback websites and tells you which one would give you the most money for your book after you enter the ISBN number. This was a fun and motivating way to get started on a category so overwhelming. I entered hundreds of ISBN numbers. In general, I learned that fiction is worth nothing, but I was often surprised that textbooks over ten years old were still worth a couple dollars. I stacked them into piles for Textbooks.com, SellBackYourBook.com, and Amazon based on which one BookScouter said would give me the most money. Be sure to check out the book condition requirements of each company. One of my books was worth about $25 but because it had a rip in the cover, no one would accept it. Each company lets you print off a free shipping label and just drop the box off at a shipper and then they reimburse you (remember that if you choose PayPal, you’ll get your money faster, but you’ll also have to pay fees). I tried to get up to $50 from each service, but failed. Here’s how it ended up breaking down:
We actually got some snow in January, which makes for a good winter, but then it all melted and we’re back to a slushy, wet, and icy January. Curse you global warming! We’ve settled back into life after Hawaii and started our major purging efforts in our home. We’ve completed everyone’s clothes, all the books in the house, and everything in my bedroom and under the bed! We delivered our first big trunk-full to Salvation Army and it felt great! For the next few Wednesdays, I’ll be documenting this journey starting this Wednesday with the process I took to get rid of half of my clothes!
Mr. T and I went nearly 9 years of marriage with one car. When we had our third child and then we had two kids in two different schools, things got trickier. Mr. T bike commutes fairly often and we talked about him doing it full time, but there was a time trade-off. He gets home about an hour later when he bike commutes and is only home for 1.5-2 hours with the kids before bedtime. We weren’t quite sure what to do. At the same time we were facing this predicament (November 2014), my cousin told us she was moving and they would sell us their 2010 Subaru Forester below trade-in value, so we bought it. 2015 was our first full year with 2 cars, so how much did it all cost us?
I’ve mentioned that I love New Year’s resolutions and I’ve shared our financial goals for 2016. I don’t like to make typical, vague goals or tie myself in to doing something I can’t achieve. With that in mind, here are my 2016 non-financial goals:
December was another lovely month and so very eventful. I finished up my semester-long ice skating class at the local university with my awesome skating performance (spoiler: I fell in the first two seconds). We finished up our largest project of the year: The Alaska State Energy Rebate Program and are looking forward to our $7700+ rebate check arriving sometime in February. I can honestly say that the thing I’m most excited about 2016 is that we are done with all the DIY home projects with a deadline! Mr. T and I attempted to sell some art at a holiday bazaar and hated it (upcoming post). But we weren’t too down because then we all got to get on a plane to Hawaii to celebrate my dad’s retirement in Hawaii for Christmas!
We’re considering an “Ask Penny” segment on the blog. And may even include Florin if she can keep her answers somewhat on track. If this is something that would be interesting, submit your questions in the comment section. The series will be entirely reader-submitted questions. So, if we get enough interest/questions, we’ll do a post.
November is so great because it ends with Thanksgiving and introduces the Christmas season. I LOVE both of those holidays! We’ve been working hard on some artsy things to attempt to sell at a Christmas bazaar in December as well as finishing up our Energy Rebate to-do list. An update on the final numbers there will happen when we finish next month.
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