Goals for money

[Permanent Temp]

I did not notice that you got married recently (congrats, btw!) The way I'm reading your post, I'm guessing that the two of you have decided to keep debts separate and to ideally split joint expenses equally. Just wanted to make sure that was the case.

Anyway, I would definitely stop the Roth contributions until at least that CC debt is gone. The interest rates are high enough on the car loan and especially the CC that I doubt you're going to beat that on the market. And honestly, if you have three months of expenses squared away, I'm not sure if your EF needs more attention either. (This is especially so if your husband's employment is more stable--how is his professional outlook right now?)

Your expenses mostly look reasonable. Personally, I would cancel the gym and paper subscriptions, but at least the dollar amount on that isn't huge. Some will say that your grocery costs are high but I can't personally say that, otherwise I'd be a hypocrite--I do enjoy good food.

Getting extra/better work will certainly help. Keep up the job search, and best of luck!

Thank you! And yes we're keeping it separate. He wanted to combine on a few occasions but we don't agree on how to allocate money and we'd fight all the time about it so instead we keep it separate and discuss what we are doing with our individual accounts and discuss expenses we should take on jointly (like medical insurance which we are currently discussing.) Even though I make money in spurts in any given year I make twice as much as he does. His job is likely ending soon and he has a second part-time job. He wants to wait until his job is gone to look for another, to me that makes no sense but he'd have unemployment for a long while and is a veteran so work is easy for him to find. It takes him about 2 months to find work while it takes me about 3-5 months. I suspect he just wants a rest from working. He sees me in my unemployment periods and sees it as a vacation or something. I don't see it that way at all. I see it as my failure to line up a new job right away and I spend that time depressed. Although last time I was messed over by my assignment but I'm not getting into that.

He has one credit card left to pay off with less than 1K balance, and some other with a less than 1K balance, other than that he has a car loan which has a fantastic interest rate but a higher payment a month than mine. So I also carry twice as much debt as he does. He's using his extra money from his part time job to pay off debt and saving money. He's told me he would need me to cover at least 1-2 months worth of bills to help him out but that would be if he has both jobs, and his full-time gig is going away at some point soon we just don't know when.

If I somehow managed to get a hold of a full time gig he would use his GI bill to get a degree, I feel like he could start doing that part time now so that might just be an excuse but I'll talk to him about it again later I'm not here to push him to do anything, just support whatever it is he wants to do. We've relied on each other for the last 3 years monetarily and have been a pretty self sufficient system so I'm sure we'll be fine no matter what happens. We've gone through times were he was unemployed with zero backup cash or unemployment and I've been able to help him and vice versa.

Stopping the Roth IRA seems like a fine idea. I've had it since I was 18 and because of college and intermittent work I've not funded it too well. It's too bad some of the returns I've had over the years have been awesome if I had had more money to put in there I would have a pretty penny saved up right now.

I keep the paper for 8 bucks a month because of the coupons they save me a lot of money, and the gym is the only way I can relieve stress other than bubble baths so I'm probably going to keep that to. My part-time job is right next door so I go there often. I got a special rate 2 years ago through a new-years resolution special so I pay about 15 less than the normal membership. I don't want to quit for a few months and then sign up again at the higher rate.

The $400 a month is not only groceries but also at least one meal out for hubby and I a month, as well as incidentals. But yes I also like good food (I regularly buy cheese and fresh bread from Whole Foods it costs the same if not less than the regular grocery store and tastes better) and with the coupons I get from the paper I stockpile expensive items when they are on sale. Nothing crazy just toilet paper, trash bags, Barilla pasta {I will only buy it when its less than 89 cents}, etc. I don't eat meat with the exception of seafood (which I don't make a habit of eating regularly due to the expense) so most days I survive off of nuts, beans, bread, peanut butter and veggies. Hubby eats meat but doesn't mind eating the way I do. This saves a lot of money (and he's probably healthier for it lol) so we can eat out once in a while (which is when I get fish and hubby gets meat lol.)

I see that most of the advise other than to stock pile money is to kill the cc and car loan so I'll focus on that. I'm still bummed about the car loan. I was supposed to have a 8% car loan but then they found two things on my credit report which shouldn't have been there as I had resolved them. I brought in the paperwork to prove they had been resolved and they still gave me the loan but for 10%, oh well at least I didn't need a co-signer I guess. I was a temp even when I got the car but that job was supposed to be temp-to-hire so they accepted it. The company apparently had other plans and let me go, which is fine. If that hadn't happened we would have never moved and were both much happier where we live now.

[dojo]

I would agree that your emergency fund doesn't look bad at all. So yes, I'd say, like many others, go pay off the debt you have. One by one (while making the minimum payments on the rest). Start with the smallest amount to return and slowly build up from there.\

I do agree with you too, about the need of a good EF. I've had many problems in my life and when the EF wasn't there, it wasn't pretty. So having a cushion is a great idea. Keep us posted and best of luck in your journey.