Monthly Financial Check-up

I haven't posted a Monthly Financial check-up since February. You can see my previous posts HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE.

Here is where we stand now:

We have paid off all non-mortgage debt except for my husband's student loan.
He is working at a low income school as a teacher in a high need subject. He will be eligible for forgiveness of $17,500 after 5 years of service. His 5 years will end in May 2010. One more year.

Building a 3-6 month emergency fund.
We currently have approximately 4 months expenses in a savings account. When we reach 6 months expenses we will slow down just a bit on savings to that account. We will continue to build it, however, and hope to have an extra $17,500 in that account by next May. This will be $17,500 above the $20K in the account for 6 months emergency fund. We want to have the extra cash available to pay off the student loan in case Uncle Sam decides to cancel the teacher loan forgiveness program.

Prepare house to sell.
We have been working on a number of projects to get the house in sell condition. You can see those HERE and HERE. More projects will be happening over the next few weeks. These projects include painting cabinets, scraping ceilings and repainting them, and painting trim. New carpet is another project, but we have to save up for the carpet.

Sell house when market improves.
Market is still terrible, so this is on hold.

Increase charitable giving to full 10%.
We are on track with our giving. We will get a statement from church to verify and make up any amount needed from our savings.

Save 15% of our income in retirement plans.
We will be putting this in place as soon as we get our 6 month emergency fund completed. We expect this to happen by August.

We will continue to look for opportunities to save in our budget. We are also selling a few items on E-bay.

We have just finished our first Financial Peace University class at our church and we were the facilitators of the class. It really helped to keep us on track to go through the class again. It was also inspiring to see how the knowledge of God's way of handling money set class participants free. If you haven't heard of Dave Ramsey or his book, The Total Money Makeover, I can't recommend his program more. We have paid off more that 60K in debt in less than two years!

Click HERE to see a portion of a FPU class.

How are you doing with your Financial Plan? Do you have an emergency fund?

Check out Money Saving Mom to see how others are doing or share your Monthly Financial Check-up.