we are paid every fortnight. that in itself is a good thing when paying debts little by little. i don't wait for the credit cards' due dates. every fortnight i pay some amount that is way bigger than the minimum. like for our sofa, i could pay it $60/month but i pay $60/fortnight which brings our hire purchase down faster.
allocating tax refund
i just remembered that my spouse still has his tax refund cheque at home! that's about $600 and we agreed to use all of it to pay CC1. that would bring our CC1 credit to almost half! woohoo! whatever leftover amount we had prior to today (pay day) was used to pay for CC3, although it's not due for another 2 weeks.
pay ourselves first
in the morning of our pay day, i immediately distribute at least 15% of our combined salaries to our 5 savings accounts. next i pay is our rent, and then i transfer my spouse's salary to my account to lessen transaction fees from his end. my checking account has (thank God) no transaction fees! that's why i chose Bank1 mainly for that reason.
investing in mutual fund
once the amount i transferred to SA5 gets credited, it will have enough funds to allow us to start investing in mutual funds. don't ask me about my knowledge of investing. my experience is as young as this blog. i plan to learn as i go on with tons of help from reading and research. now that i sort of mastered the habit of regularly saving and not dipping into our savings, it's starting to bore me. plus, it doesn't hurt to establish another income stream.
gift giving
my spouse asked me what i'd want for Christmas. i said that it's fine if he decides not to give me anything so long as he does not use any of our credit card for the next 3 months apart from paying his student loan. to that he just smiled. i know he can do it. he probably just feels controlled or limited or something to that effect. this year our Christmas gift to our coworkers are brownies, which i baked myself. it's much cheaper and less stressful. no need to think of specifics. food is always a good thing to give or receive, better when made by yourself.
insurance
we pay our insurance fortnightly too. our health insurance is already deducted from my spouse's salary so we don't feel it really. i'm not sure how much it is, but i think it's about $20+ a fortnight. our content and car insurance are about $42 altogether a fortnight, which is on auto-debit. paying them little by little is also really good because we don't get hurt that way unlike if we have to pay them, say, quarterly or semi-annually or (worse) annually. public health here in new zealand is quite good, but we still think we need the cushion a health insurance can bring. we just had a short discussion today about letting the insurance provider know of our baby who's coming out soon!
i hope that in no time i'd be able to blog about paying our car loan more than it's minimum once again. as you can see from the sidebar, we still owe 60% of the loan. oh my god, how sweet it is to think that our debts are going down little by little.
No comments:
Post a Comment