Hey everyone, it’s Finance Fridays again. I didn’t do a Whatever Wednesdays post, since the Monday post was so random. Today I’m going to just quickly talk about “Catching Up with Sensei”.
Getting Caught Up
I’ve mentioned it before, but I think 2020 is going to be “our year” to get things done. We finally have become stable enough to take care of some of the more pressing home improvements. The lanai has been renovated pretty extensively and the house has been repainted. Just this last weekend we were able to get the air conditioners replaced. At the same time, the old ACs were removed and the dry wall has been patched (and looks good!).
Now, I’m going to turn my attention toward putting new screen doors on the lanais and getting the downstairs bathroom usable. I don’t foresee this costing too much more money. After that I will look into exhaust fans, maybe — however, that isn’t a huge priority right now.
Now then, in other financial matters.
I am planning to pay down our student loans significantly this year. The plan is to put a substantial dent in the loans this year, probably around March. The reason for this is because we still have some home improvement projects to do and I want to know how our taxes are going to look. Also my wife is a little concerned about setting aside enough money for the New Jersey Trip of 2020.
After March, I plan to continue paying the same amount toward our loans that we had been paying, but with extra payments toward the higher interest loans. Previously, I really wanted to pay off all the loans as quickly as possible. However, recently, I am not really seeing a huge benefit to paying off our lower interest loans early, other than a psychological one.
For this reason, the loans which are < 2% interest will probably just stay on the original 20 year plan forever. They will be paid off eventually. However, the more I think about it, does it really make sense to pay off the 3% loans either? The interest on our mortgage is 3.25%. From a financial standpoint, it may make more sense to pay off the home mortgage, or to just simply put that money somewhere else.
I think may end up just “staying the course”.
Whatever our current loan payments are now, I will continue paying that amount every month. Then on regular intervals, perhaps quarterly, I will make lump sum payments toward higher interest loans when we have an excess.
In addition this, I have increased the amount of money we are putting toward the 529s for the kids to $1000 each. I may increase Kylie’s to $1100 or $1200 for a few years since she had a later start than Lucas did. Overall, I think our 529 plan has worked out ok so far.
Although I wish I could have superfunded them both, that just was not possible for us. We’ve finally been able to increase our 529 contributions up to our goal of $1000/month for each child. I’m very happy about that. It’s not perfect, but I think our plan is reasonable for us.
TL;DR
Just catching up everyone with what’s happening for us in 2020.
-Sensei
Agree? Disagree? Questions, Comments and Suggestions are welcome.
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