Earlier in the month I stated my goals for March.  I’m going to list each goal and talk about how things went.  Overall, I think we did pretty good.  I think I’ll give myself a grade of about 80%, so there’s definitely some room for improvement here.

1. Reduce overall debt by $2000.  We managed to drop $2027.77 in debt this month.  Considering I had to replace the garage door opener (~$200) during this time, I think we did great.  This doesn’t count a ~$60 finance charge that’ll apply tomorrow, so I’m actually just under my goal in my mind.  Most of this is medical bills that got paid right out of my flex spending plan from work as well.  This also doesn’t count the money we just spent for our last two trips that we’d already planned before going on a budget.  I finally bought the plane tickets this month, but we paid cash for all but one.  The other will be paid by next month.  This completely concludes planned vacations for a long time.
2. Follow the envelope budgeting system.  I posted how we created and maintain our system earlier this month.  It’s really been helpful, and we stuck to it almost perfectly.  There was a couple of things that we didn’t account for and had to pull money from our little miscellaneous stash to accommodate for them.  I think the cash habit is here to stay though!
3. Complete the separation of my daily journal from the main blog and their respective feeds.   I finally did it, but I haven’t picked up my daily journal routine since.  This will definitely be addressed in the next month.
4. Finish my debt scales page that shows the breakdown of individual debt progress, not just the overall on the header.  I totally blew this one off.  This is the source of most of my bad grade this month.
5. Follow a new schedule that I’ve created for myself on running this blog.  I’m pretty happy with most of the month.  The last week I’ve gotten so little sleep that I just couldn’t seem to finish doing any polishing on my posts.  So they’re all still sitting in my queue here waiting for me to get them post-ready.  (For large posts, I write drafts a week or two in advance, then polish them a day or so before they go out.)  I think there’s room for improvement, but I’m still getting used to a routine amongst my chaotic life.

So, I think we did pretty good financially.  Even with a $200 setback for a garage door opener, we managed to stick to our plans.  The rest of my report mostly concerns the blog itself, which is something I hope to improve on now that our financial progress is on track.