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The end of March and beginning of April have been pretty interesting for the Summit of Coin Household. Baseball season began the day I returned back to work. This season of the year, requires me to spend a minimum of 10 hours a day at work, plus we play our games on Saturdays.

During this season of the year, I work 60+ at my job each week, which does not allow a lot of time for blogging as I focus on my family when I am at home. Not only are we strapped for time each weekend with baseball season, but our family computer has been acting up. It has been running slow and somethings can take hours to complete.

Thus, I have been a little absent on the blog due to technical difficulty and a busy workload, but I have an update article ready for you this week!

Goal #1 Update:

Goal #1 is our mortgage payoff goal. At the beginning of the year, I shared that we had a goal of paying off $12,000 of our mortgage in 2019. That’s approximately $1,000 a month towards the mortgage. Below is a list of the principal paid off for each month:

January: $982.11
February: $984.56
March: $987.31
TOTAL - $2,953.98

This amount is based on us just paying the minimum mortgage payment every month. Thus, we are a little bit under the amount needed to reach $12,000 by the end of the year, however, the amount of principal paid will increase each month and will cross over $1,000 mark in July or August. Therefore, we probably won’t need to pay any extra on the mortgage to reach our goal by the end of the year.

Goal #2 Update:

Goal #2 is our goal to save over $68,000 over the course of 2019. This is a big jump from last year, as we saved around $44,000 last year. That increase happened, because we are focusing on more tax-deferred savings options, whereas, last year we focused on emergency funds and mortgage payoff.

Below is a look at our savings over the course of March:

The $4,864.41 saved in March, includes principal payoff of our house. That number increased by approximately $300 from last month. We saw an increase, because my wife earned a raise and this increased the amount that we put in her retirement accounts.

Below is a look at our savings over the entire year:

Three months in, I can’t complain about our savings. I am happy with the path we are taking. However, based on the first two months, we are falling behind a little on reaching our savings goal of more than $68,000. Three areas affect this number:

My 457b contributions of $800 a month (800 x 12 = $9,600) needs to be increased to reach our goal of $12,000 saved in the account.
We have not invested in both of our daughters college funds. We are looking at doing our lump sum investments in April. ($2,000 for 2019 for our oldest, $2,000 for 2019 for our youngest and $2,000 for our youngest for 2018).
Our savings in the Emergency/Car Fund/Medical accounts is nowhere near the amount needed to reach $5,000 over the course of a year.

If we stay on our current path, we will save around $60,956.24 over the course of 2019. That’s a pretty dang good number. Sure, it doesn’t hit our goal, but I can’t imagine many people complaining about saving $60,000 in a year!

Goal #3 Update:

This year, with our increase in pre-tax savings, we increased our savings goal from 30% to 40%. In February, we hit our 40% savings rate. However, March saw a decrease in the savings rate!

Our savings rate fell to 34% in March. We actually saved more in March than we saved in February, but our traveling expenses caused our overall expenses to increase in March.

2019 Savings Rates:

January: 34%
February: 40%
March: 34%
Year-to-Date: 36%

Our year-to-date savings rate, stayed the same from February to March. The 36% savings rate for the entire year is higher than all of last year. I am happy with our progress this year, and I am especially excited to share our April savings!

How are you doing in reaching your goals for 2019? Are you falling behind? What do you need to do to get back on track?