Educating the Wheelers

Looking ahead, these are my goals for 2006:

* Give birth at home to a healthy boy end of April/early May.
* Settle on a name for said boy with Andrew
* Read and exercise every day with Audrey
* Relax and enjoy parenting/my kids

* Drop our mortgage principle by at least an extra 10k
* Up our automatic monthly emergency fund contributions an additional 25%
* Continue maxxing out our 401k and Roths.
* Straighten out our life insurance/will situation.

I think I’m sandbagging a bit, so I might have to update these later. Heh.

This year has been great!

We transitioned from Andrew handling the bulk of the finances and me being totally clueless to me handling the bulk of the finances and Andrew keeping occasional tabs on things.

Audrey turned 2 years old, and we finally got pregant again.

We put together a solid financial plan, and pretty much the whole thing [save for how much we prepay extra on our mortgage each month] is on complete autopilot. We cut back our discretionary spending, we cut back our day to day living expenses significantly. We have +/- 45% of our pre-tax income going into savings these days. And that is AWESOME.

And a bunch of other stuff. But all told, it was a good year for money. We have been very lucky, and tried not to squander our good fortune.

So, after a good month or so of being really tight with money, I’ve spent more money in the last couple of days than the last 2 months. [Save for bills, of course.] Admittedly, it was stuff we had been planning to buy for some time, but actually pulling the trigger on most of it at one time felt weird. But this is good! This means that I’ve definitely turned that corner from buying things giving me a rush to buying things giving me the heebeejeebees.

A major part of this little mini-spree was getting hard plastic pantry containers for, well, just about everything. I’ve been battling a moth problem in the pantry for some time, and they were winning. These are some pretty tenacious Texas moths that have chewed through just about everything that I have wrapped or sealed my pantry items in. They chew through boxes, through freezer bags, thin plastic, you name it. I don’t think they’ll be able to chew through the containers that I bought today, though.

So Audrey and I spent the afternoon going through our pantry, chunking what’s already been infested and repackaging the rest. I now have a lot of empty space in the pantry. Heh.