update
May 7th, 2008 at 02:57 pmWow, I can’t believe it’s been two months since I last wrote here. Well I sort of can, the last couple months of school were horribly busy, not leaving me time for hardly anything! But now that’s over with and summer is here.
We’ve had some big changes financially here. First of all DH has been in Italy for the past 3 months. While it’s been hard to have him out of the country, it’s been very good for us financially. They get paid per diem, a set amount each day that they can spend on hotel or food or whatever they want. It’s amounted to nearly an extra 1500 a month for us! On top of that we got our tax return and some extra family separation pay so we’ve been able to fully fund our 2009 Roth contributions! I’m so excited that we’ve been able to do this and there is no way I thought it would be possible to do this early in the year. Now, I know that we can’t actually make that contribution yet, but it’s sitting in our savings account accruing interest until January when we make the deposit.
Funding our Roth IRAs has been my number one savings goal. When I graduate from pharmacy school I don’t know that we’ll be able to continue contributing to them because our income will probably be too high. I’m trying to make sure we take full advantage now, while we can.
Everyone is all excited about the economic stimulus money. I’m excited to think we’ll be getting some extra money, but I think we’ll only be getting $460, not the $1200 that was being thrown around. Although I guess I can’t really complain. We only ended up pay $460 in taxes, so to get that back, means we won’t have paid anything last year. In other tax news, last month DH entered a combat zone, albeit one that hasn’t had any fighting for several years. Since he did that though, his income for the month of May should be tax free. That will probably add up to another $500 this month, and save us down the road too.
Having my #1 savings goal met, I’ve been thinking about what to do with the rest of our ‘profits’. I basically consider whatever we haven’t spent by the end of the month our profit. I know a lot of people have to work backwards and take the savings out first, but thankfully DH and I have pretty low expenses and lately the government’s been throwing money at us. But anyway. Six months ago I realized that it wasn’t financially sound to pay of DH’s car early. We were earning higher interest in our savings account than we were paying in interest on his car. However, since the rates of the accounts have dropped so dramatically, and we’ve met our Roth goal, I think I’m going to start diverting some of our profit towards his car.
On top of all of this I’m starting my internship today. It actually will start on Monday, but since I didn’t know anything about the store, they’re having me come in today to get my feet wet. I’m mostly working for the experience, having never actually worked in a pharmacy it will be interesting to see the things I’ve been learning about put to work. However, I’m not going to refuse a pay check! Actually the company I’m working for has the lowest starting wage for interns, but as a customer I like their store the best. So it should work out. I’m still working on a transfer to Maine. DH comes home the beginning of June and I plan to spend the summer up there with him. It’s been too long since we’ve seen each other! So I’m heading up there regardless if I have a job or not, although, it would be nice to have some sort of job up there. Having this week off of school and not working has been torture!
Well I think that’s all of the major financial happenings that have been going on! Hopefully I’ll be able to post more now that school is out.