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!