SWB: Alan B. Rowley II - Success Coach - ECoaching - Email Coaching

I Own a Fisher Space Pen

Taking PTE Rick's suggestion, I purchased a Space Pen as part of his high-tech dayplanner.  Did I need a space pen?  Not really.  I usually wear shirts to work that have pockets and so my G2's fit nicely and do a wonderful job.  There are some days that I wear a polo though or days like yesterday where the uniform of the day was a t-shirt. 

Yesterday was my first trial run with the space pen and it worked just like he said (like he was going to lie).  I slipped the pen into the pocket of my jeans and it fit very nicely at the bottom.  It was comfortable and there was no chance of it breaking.

Breakage was something that I worried about with my G2s on training day.  That blue gel ink would most assuredly destroy any clothing that it came into contact with, especially if it was the whole pen worth of ink.  Now I'll take my space pen with me on training days.

I'm using the 3X5 cards too.

Have I mentioned what a good sport my wife is to put up with a husband who tries all kinds of different (different sounds better than weird) stuff?

Missed it by that much

I took a look at our numbers for April this morning.  We didn't do as well as we hoped.  Not even close.  Not that we did badly.  We just were hoping to do better.

We paid off .11% of the mortgage again this month.  At this rate, it's going to take us something like 30 years to get the dang thing paid off.  =)

We paid off 4.73% of the car loan.  I am looking forward to working on paying this off.  5% isn't terrible but when you see how fast you can pay things off, it's easy to get impatient.  We are going to take care of a couple of things after we pay off the student loan before we start on the car but we should be started on it by the end of June or beginning of July.  We are still hoping to have the car paid off this year.  If we succeed, we wil have paid it off in about half the time it was supposed to take.

The student loan was where the disappointment comes in.  Last month we paid off 30.07% of the balance.  This month we were hoping to pay off about 50% and we missed by a long way.  We paid off 34.97% of the balance in April.  We were hoping for 50% in April and 100% in May.

We had some things come up that took some of our money to take care of.  My wife said something last week that is so important in this plan.  She was really disappointed that we weren't going to be able to put more money toward the student loan but she was happy that we had the cash to take care of things that came up.  So many people turn to credit cards to deal with surprise expenditures. 

So it will take us a couple extra weeks to get rid of this debt.  That's pretty minor in the grand scheme of things.

Taking a look at our goals

Last night my wife and I had our weekly meeting.  We take a good look at our financial plan each week to make sure we are on course.  I haven't posted much about it here because after doing it for a little more than a year, there usually isn't much to report.  It's just more of the same as far as reporting it to outsiders.  "We are still doing great and still putting most of our money toward our debts," would be about the extent of a weekly post. 

When things do happen that seem a little bit different, then I post about it.  Last night was a little bit different in that we decided to change some of our financial priorities.  We have target dates set for most of our financial goals.  We have done this since the beginning of the program.  We review those goals each week to see if we are on track, what we need to do to get on track if we aren't, or revise the goals if things have changed.

It looks like it might take a week longer than we hoped to pay off the student loan.  We were hoping to have it paid off by May 31st but we have some things coming up in May that will probably delay it.  It will be nice when it's gone and we can't really complain if it takes us 14 months and 1 week to pay off a 20 year loan.  Well, we did complain a little bit but we shouldn't.  =)   

An improptu finance meeting

My wife and I decided to suspend our weekly finance meetings for November and December and just kind of go with the flow.  We've been following the plan long enough that "going with the flow" doesn't pose much of a threat to our plan.  We just want to enjoy the holidays and not stress much about the money.  We talk about it, and read articles about it still.  She is still doing her research paper on personal finance and I am still writing this blog so it's not as if we have completely banished all thoughts of the plan from our thoughts.

She was in the mood to look over our finances for this month so we sat down and did it.  We didn't follow our normal pattern but just sat down with paper and a pen and looked at how the month is going to play out.  We were a little surprised by what we saw and in a good way.

So we projected it out for the next few months to see what it would look like when there were no holiday expenditures.  It looks very promising.

When we started our plan in April, we set some goals that seemed nearly impossible.  Our thinking went like this. 

This is what we would really like to see happen.  We set our goals as a best case scenario even though it didn't look possible.  And if we missed a little bit, we would still be so much further along that it would end up being a good thing anyway. 

If our goal was to pay off a $30,000 loan in one year and we only paid off $27,000 of it, we just can't feel too bad about that.

Looking at it last night, we might achieve our first *impossible* goal on time and our second one ahead of schedule.

And from there . . . Wow!