I meant to start this blog when I bought a new house, almost a year ago. So here is a "catch up" entry for the last 10 months.

Jessica and I bought a house in East Lansing . It's a 1400 sqft with no basement and a detached garage. It cost us $175,000. We got a 30 yr mortgage with 20% down. We got the seller to pay $3000 of the closing costs, and our current balance on the mortgage is about $138,000. We decided to escrow and autopay for convenience, and our total payments are $1280/mo.

In August Jessica got accepted to a PhD program at Michigan State University, here in town, and she gets a nice stipend of $1750/mo (before taxes). We use that income to pay off our CC's.

Our first payment was Sep. 1, 2006, which gave us over a full months without any rent or home payments, which allowed us to save over $1700 in the month of august.

In October, the delayed payroll income of Jessica's old job continued while she started her PhD, and we were able to save over $2000.

Since then we've had good and bad months. We did all our furniture shopping at IKEA, and we may have spent $2000 there. Also, I allow myself to buy 1 *big* thing a year. It is usually electronics. in 2005 it was a new laptop ($1400) and in 2006 it was a 37" LCD TV ($600 on sale). This year I might skip it, because of the cost of our upcoming wedding/honeymoon (but of course we are getting help from our families too).

I put $500 a month into my *no touching* account at citibank. It earns about 4.50% in interest, which is about $14/mo right now. This is essentially our rainy-day fund, and I'd like to grow it to about $20,000.

I do not micromanage my spending. I like to look at the months end spending, especially at: clothing, groceries, eating out, household, home improvement and entertainment categories. If they exceed my expectations (budget), I will look closer at them next month, otherwise I don't worry about them. My budget is not very stringent, however, if I go over two month in a row, I either make a budget adjustment, or I conscientiously start spending less money in each category. I don't like to go to a place and order/shop specifically for a dollar here or there.

In april, I pre-paid part of our honeymoon, and that's why our net worth declined over the period. I haven't started an IRA yet, nor have I invested in stocks. I hope to start in early 2008, when I hope to have a decent cash pile to start investing.