Throughout 2017 and at the beginning of 2018 I was certain my mom's husband was going to pass away and this would be our trigger to look for new housing. We were living in my mom's house, while she lived with her 2nd husband in town at his house and she would of course want to come back to her home. We saved while paying off loans but it wasn't adding up fast enough. By the end of 2017 we had $660.97 in Vanguard and I realized my biggest problem was I had pockets of money in too many locations so I decided to consolidate all savings into the Vanguard money market account. Easy to drop in, easy to take out.
Acorns - I wrote a post here about my experiment with this app, it didn't work out for me, maybe I wasn't aggressive enough but I figured at the end of the day, money will grow faster if it's all put into one location and can grow based on size so this was the first account to go. Cash out value $270.39.
Jury Duty, Ebay Sales, Unused Medical, Surveys - $1140.45
Most of these are self explanatory. Unused medical is from saving $200 per month in a basic savings account. We have Samaritan Ministries which is a cost sharing plan where members pay a base monthly fee, ours is around $450 and this covers other members medical fees. We pay our own routine doctor visits out of pocket from the $200 per month, this includes flu shots, contacts, and prescriptions; whatever is leftover at the end of the year goes into our master savings account.
Costco Rebate - $526.33
State Farm savings account - $1067.59
Consolidated another savings account and closed a non-performing E-trade account - $635.51
Side Hustle Account - $1452.38 (from consignment sales)
By this point we were in June and with dividends we had around $5800. We had already found the house we wanted to buy and were working with a mortgage company so we knew we needed 10K by August or September. We realized we needed to save $1500 per month for the next three months to reach 10K. Those last three months were hard, especially as they went through the summer months where we tend to spend a little more on vacation and had to get new tires for the main vehicle but somehow we managed to make it to the 10K mark in time to close on September 12th!
When I look back at the specific amounts that went into this closing cost, it makes me chuckle, who would think jury duty pay would help towards closing costs? The point is, if you get extra money and don't need it for monthly expenses then squirrel it away in one account that can build more interest. We made $55.16 in dividends with Vanguards simple money market account in this year. It's better than what our bank accounts can offer and it built faster the more we had in there.
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