Project: Saving Money!

We need to save a certain amount of money to take with us to the closing of the house. This includes the down payment of 3% of the purchase price, taxes, points, and some closing costs (the sellers are paying all but about $200 of the closing costs). In addition there are going to be some larger items to pay for before moving, like $150 to the photographers of our wedding to finish up the album and $200 for tires for my car. I would also like to have the first 2 mortgage payments in the bank before we close, along with the final rent payment, and some money for the moving expenses (moving truck, pizza for helpers, flip switching at the cable and electric companies, etc.).

I know this may sound like I am going a bit overboard, since we are totally going to be able to afford the new place, but you just never know what will happen and we may have to replace the hot water heater right away or something else strange. I just want to have a cushion!

My plan to have this amount saved up, is to save $150 from each of our paychecks each week. Smug-Hub's mom is loaning us $3,500, so that leaves about $3,000 to save - we can do this and still pay all the normal bills too, but I wanted to try to save more, so here's what we did this weekend!

1) we decided to pay just the minimum on the 4 credit cards that we have. We had been paying $100 on each, now we will be paying only about $30 on each. This will save us about $280 each month.

2) We emptied out the storage unit into our spare room and into my mom's attic. This took about 5 hours yesterday to do. Smug-Hub brought everything into mom's house from the truck and I took everything up the attic stairs. My legs are killing me today! This will save us $45 a month.

3) We have stopped eating out! This saves us untold amounts because we never kept track of it before!!

4) We have a lady come to clean the apartment twice a month. We decided to have a cleaning lady when we were working a ton of hours, planning the wedding and going to school and did not want to spend our very limited free time cleaning. The work and school thing is still true, and it is also still true that we don't want to spend our limited free time cleaning - but doing our own cleaning will save us $60 per month.

So what does all this add up to??? Well... There are 8 weeks until we close, so at the very least we will have an extra $700!!! That really added up and we are really not any worse off for it!!

Once we get moved and settled into the new payments we can start adding back in some eating out, up the payments on the credit cards, and perhaps have the lady come back and do the cleaning for us.

Although, I have to be honest.... I am sort of looking forward to cleaning my own house. There must be something instinctual about taking possession of your home and caring for it and truly owning it! Perhaps I will get over that really fast - who knows!!