February 2022 Debt Snowball Update – Let’s Adjust Our Strategy
Happy March! I hope it’s off to a good start. We have a few fun things planned this month, but first I want to talk about what happened with our February Debt Snowball.
February ended up being a lot busier than I imagined. We celebrated 2 birthdays, our anniversary, and valentines day. To be honest, I didn’t plan as well for February as I usually do.
I figured since we weren’t planning to do anything, it would look like a regular month. That was wrong! I completely forgot about a few extra expenses that we have during this month, so let’s talk about it.
The Budget
To be honest, our budget for February sucked and it was my fault! As I mentioned, I just felt like it would be a regular month since we didn’t have big plans.
We ended up having so much fun celebrating and hanging out that we went over budget in several categories.
Those categories were groceries, restaurants, spur of the moment, Entertainment, and Miscellaneous. It was kind of a disaster because when you go over a category in YNAB, that money has to come from somewhere.
This means we had to adjust some of our other categories to move money around. In addition to that, my husband had to get a new battery for his car!
The way we have our budget set up makes it so easy to stay stress-free when we have months like this. We are able to pay for the things that we need and most of the things that we want because it is built right into the budget.
Now, we just have to replenish our car maintenance and repairs category in March and all is well! Let’s move on to the debt snowball!
February Debt Snowball
The debt snowball for February was pretty simple. Our main focus right now is on getting those two medical bills paid down.
We were able to pay $69.83 to finish off the largest of my husband’s bills which leaves us with a balance of $378.05 for his. We paid $227.77 towards my bill and I now have a balance of $555.79. This means that we only owe $783.56 to finish off these bills.
Our mortgage was $1212 and we didn’t pay anything extra towards the mortgage in January or February. Our remaining mortgage amount is $182,862.85. I’m happy with our progress so far.
I want to mention that our mortgage is going up to $1407.91 in March. The reason is that our property taxes went up.
The bank covered the property taxes at the time they were due, and now they have adjusted the mortgage so that we can pay them back. It’s not ideal, but this is where we are. Let’s move on to the savings challenge.
2022 Savings Challenge
I mentioned in the 2022 savings challenge video that my only goal this year is to save $10,000. While that is true, I think we need to re-evaluate our goal for the time being.
We reached our goal of $800 in January and in the last video I drew $1,000. Spoiler alert, we did NOT reach our $1,000 goal for February. We were able to save $250 which brings our savings challenge total to $1,050.
With that being said, I think we’re going to switch gears for now.
We owe $783.56 for our medical bills and while we aren’t being charged interest, our mortgage is going up and I want these bills gone so that we can save freely.
We’re going to pay off the medical bills with the savings challenge money and start over from the amount that is left.
That means I won’t draw a new savings amount this month. I’m going to focus on getting to the $1,800 from these cards and I will draw a new card when we reach it.
I feel really good about this decision and I still think we will be able to reach $10k by the end of the year.
The Bottom Line
Now, I want to hear from you. You all get to see how our budget and debt payoff choices change from month to month based on what we have going on.
So I want to know if you are more of a roll with the punches, move money around person when it comes to budgeting, or do you stick to the budget and only adjust when it is absolutely necessary.
If you want to learn more about how our debt-free journey started, check out our Debt-Free Journey. Let’s chat about it in the comments!
