Skip to main content

Financial Planning

Being parents now, my husband and I have given some consideration to creating a college fund for our daughter. The numbers a friend of ours came up with stopped us in our tracks because it required making a $200 monthly payment into an account for our daughter.

While we'd love to be able to do that for her, it's just not feasible, especially as we try to pay off our debt. What we had in mind was something we can contribute to on an irregular basis as we get extra money, such as if/when we get a tax refund or get some overtime. We've been hanging on to our initial investment for her college account for getting close to a year now. It's time to move on to something else, because the 0.1 percent annual rate it's earning in our regular savings account isn't going to help.

All of the options out there are just so overwhelming.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Finding a use for gifts you don't use

( Stuart Miles / FreeRangeStock.com ) Question: Someone gives you a present. You open it, give the gifter a sincere smile, and say, "Thank you," but you know that gift is something you'll never use. Not once. What do you do with it later? Me? I keep them. I just can't shake the feeling of guilt that goes along with regifting or selling them. As a result, my family and I have lots of items we either haven't used in years or have never used at all: An electric knife, electric griddle, a big mixer, something called Yonanas. The list goes on and on. But the bottom line is, Yonanas and electric knives don't fit my family's lifestyle. They never have, and I doubt they ever will. So I think I might need to get over feeling like it would be ungrateful to get rid of them and post them in places like Craigslist or some of those online sales sites on Facebook for sale. That way, at least we can have the cash to pay toward part of our debt. Wouldn't...

Trimming the Grocery List

This week is another grocery shopping week, and I'm dreading it. I had at one point managed to get my grocery spending under $175 every two weeks, the last few trips have not gone that well. They've all totaled more than $200, not including any supplementary trips I needed to make later. I'm not really sure what I can do to cut it more at this point beyond rethink what we've been eating. Over the past few months, the price of ground beef has gone up quite a bit, and much of what we eat has ground beef in it. I had been buying the leanest beef available, but on my last grocery trip, I bought 90/10 meat. Perhaps we'll need to eat more chicken.

Getting Ready for Etsy Debut

One of my hopes for making a little extra money is to see some of my handmade crafts on Etsy. I have a few items I'd like to list -- a couple of bracelets -- but the beads on them are so small that I'm having trouble getting decent photos of them. Hopefully, I'll have something usable by the end of the week.