Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I am even writing this right now. I woke up at 5:00 AM and decided to reconcile our budget (which I have been halfheartedly following) because it was bothering me so much. Two hours later… I am ready to talk about the last two months.
So, holy sh*t! We bought a house! Sorry for the language, but there is literally no other way to express this.
There is so much that comes with buying a house. Watching that down payment and closing cost transaction come right out of our account, and feeling like you have very little to show for it. Especially since we’ve still been living in our old house as renovations are getting underway on the new one.
One of the biggest struggles I’m having is assigning a value to the home. Of course, it appraised for a certain dollar amount, but how do I include our improvements, short of having another appraisal completed? Since we’ve purchased, we’ve removed carpets, deep cleaned, refinished the wood floors, painted (cosmetically, much better, but I can’t believe I recorded over $500 in charges for paint), replaced a lot of somewhat faulty electric, and our central air install begins on Wednesday. Some of it is purely cosmetic, which can increase the appeal and sales price of the home, but some of it is just function, and that is so hard to determine a value for.
Now, why does this matter? For my sanity. I am the crazy lady that records every transaction to the penny and tracks our net worth progress religiously. Due to all of the outgoing funds to pay for said renovations and upgrades, but no adjustment in the home value, it appears that our net worth has already decreased by $14,000, which isn’t even as bad as it could be, thank goodness for market appreciation in our other investments. And we still have a lot of the central air to pay for when it is completed!
Short of having another appraisal done (no thanks), I think we’re just going to ask our realtor and maybe another to come in and give us an estimated list price. The home is only worth what you can sell it for, and we’re paying attention to comparable listings in our neighborhood (which are going up), so hopefully this net worth graph will level out soon. It’s giving me anxiety.
Other than that, as you probably know of me, I stress eat. And I stress eat at restaurants. Good restaurants. So our home buying fund had to absorb some $800 worth of restaurant charges in June. Which is horrible! Even crazier, I have been working more, which brings in a little bit more money into the budget, but it does not help the stress eating, since I feel like there has been no time whatsoever to cook. Luckily, we will be fully moved into the new home by July 10, so the takeout and restaurant charges can start to level out.
On a positive note, we’ve been pretty proficient at squirreling money away into some shorter term CDs that are earning ~2%. Not amazing, but not horrible, and it is kindof taking the funds out of spendable money and out of sight, which is reigning in our home spending a bit. I think the worst is over, we have about one or two more gallons of paint to buy and maybe a couple area rugs, but we can get back on track. And the market appreciation has really been helping with keeping things in line.
Our retirement savings have still been good, and I think it is purely because of how difficult it is to adjust the outgoings from our paychecks. So our currently saved cash is eating up our overspending instead of our income, and our income is still programmed to go to our retirement funds. This is not the best strategy, but it will do.
In May, we contributed $1678.02 to our retirement accounts.
In June, we contributed $1760.60 to our retirement accounts. This is more than our minimum mortgage payment, which is now our benchmark. (Our mortgage payment is $1708.88 monthly, but we are adding small amounts of additional principal.)
Like every month, our goals in July are to eat more meals at home, spend a little less on gas and other things, and maybe make a little money on the side.
