Declutter Challenge Day 15: Our Savings Account!

UPDATE: I just received word that hubby's mom and brother are going to be visiting sometime this weekend. They're driving him back to college, and he goes to school only 2 hours from here, so they're going to take advantage of that and come see the baby all of us. So, I've got to declutter like a possessed woman to make my house look presentable. It's not like they'll strike me down if my house is a mess, but there's just something innate in me that would rather die than receive people in a messy house.

In my opinion, there are immaterial things that can clutter up our lives just as much as material objects. The mess that is our savings account has actually bothered me as much as the boxes around my house lately, so today I will be tackling our financial mess instead. On Sunday, I shared our Financial Fitness Plan and our main financial goals. One of my top priorities was to properly maintain our one online savings account.

Basically we have two accounts - a checking account that we use for direct deposit and to pay bills with, and a savings account. Since I haven't started IRAs for our retirement or for our daughter's college fund yet, all of our savings are currently going into this one online account along with our goal-getting money. I needed a way to properly track what the money was going into the account for. I needed to declutter our money, and create an organized way to look at our savings account.

I decided to start our savings account chart on June 1st, since before then I really didn't have a rigid budget like I do now. After organizing our money into their separate categories, here are our goals and our progress on them:

• Emergency Fund ($1000): DONE!
• Car Payment ($17,875 at $400/month): $16,525 to go! At the current rate, it'll be 3.5 years before we're done. But since we're only paying ourselves back and it's not a real debt, I'm not too concerned.
• Retirement Savings: $2000 - I don't think we'll be contributing more at this point since I still haven't figured out the IRA accounts.
  
• Washer & Dryer ($532 by 12/08): $386.52 to go! $100/month should do it.
• HD LCD TV ($900 by 11/08): $619.35 to go! We'll have to do $200/month.
• Interest (3% rate): $18.95 from 2 months. Not great, but better than nothing.
  

Now that I've decluttered the savings account, I can see at a glance what we need to work on. Thankfully we will be receiving some money from the moving company that we can put towards the washer & dryer and TV funds, because I think I might have a heart attack if I have to adjust our budget so we can put away a total of $775 a month until Thanksgiving.

I also see that Hailey's college fund is more than half of our total retirement fund. That's not really a big deal, because we're not planning to retire for a couple of decades, but that just alerts me to the fact that I should be putting away just as much if not more towards our retirement every month. After all, we can get a loan for college - we can't get a loan for retirement. So starting next month, I think we will begin putting away $75 towards our retirement fund. Technically the car payments are going into our retirement also, but the point is that money should have been invested and not spent, so we need to build that back up ASAP.

Although today's declutter wasn't your traditional getting-rid-of-material clutter, I feel that today was just as productive as the rest of my decluttering days. Kind of defeats the purpose of a clutter-free house if our checkbook is a mess...

And wow, it's Friday again! This week has sure flown by at the speed of light. I don't feel like I've done a lot at all, but looking back, I guess I have:

Declutter Challenge Day 14: Coupon system
Declutter Challenge Day 13: Living room Curio display cabinet
Declutter Challenge Day 12: Supply Closet
Declutter Challenge Day 11: Downstairs guest bathroom
Declutter challenge day 10: Master bedroom DONE!!!
Declutter challenge day 9: bill paying!

I can't believe I've done this for two weeks already - and there's STILL so much clutter in my house!!! At this rate, I'm going to have to extend this to a Declutter rest-of-the-year....