Spring Cleaning

Yes, I still believe in spring cleaning. However, it has taken a different turn this year--it's been a financial house cleaning for us this spring. Yessir, the enormous refund we have received from our federal taxes is no more...we have rearranged our W-4s and can happily expect to maybe pay a little or get just a little back come next tax season. This is a good thing, because unlike many folks in America, we understand that giving Uncle Sam an interest-free loan is not good financial planning. Really if you want a tax "bonus" of a couple extra thousand dollars per year, adjust your W-4s and set up a savings account to which you automatically transfer the money that would otherwise go to Uncle Sam, and let yourself withdraw from it on April 15th. The beauty of that is not only will you still get the thousands, but you will have made some extra $$ on it too.

Anyhoo, we have improved our monthly cash flow thanks to that little change. This will be extremely helpful this summer when I'm not getting paid, and oh yeah we forgot about THIS expense, or THAT THING that we do for the kids or need to do for the kids right now but oops we didn't budget for it, how am I going to pay for that again? Things like, I don't know, our ten year anniversary weekend getaway that we are talking about doing, which will involve spending a decent amount of money. Oh sure, not in a thousands of dollars kind of way, or even a thousand dollars, but still, a fair whack of moola to throw down the tubes for a few days of family fun, know what I'm saying? So having that money pre-budgeted and knowing that yes, we CAN afford to do that, even when I'm not getting paid for three months, well that is a nice thing to know.

We are also refinancing our mortgage. Our interest rate is more than full percent higher than current 30 year rates, and seeing as we are not looking to move any time soon and we can recoup our costs for refinancing within a year, yeah, we are all over that! This move too will save us a pretty good amount of money on our mortgage, which allows us to speed up the debt paydown even further (family fun fest of a few days out of town notwithstanding). I realize that we are refinancing a mortgage which we have paid down for X years, to be paying again a higher percentage to interest, which kind of sucks. However, this enables us to pay off higher interest debt faster, which makes a lot of sense when you crunch the numbers. Therefore we are going full steam ahead with this plan, and have been conditionally approved for our refinance. Now we are submitting all the paperwork that proves, yes, we have these assets that we said we did, our house is worth what we said it's worth (here we are very blessed to live where we do in WA and not back in AZ where we used to live, ouch that would not be fun), and we are fine upstanding credit-worthy citizens with a great track record of paying what we owe, and therefore you want to own our mortgage. So all systems go, and hopefully in about 45 days we will be signing our new loan paperwork and saying hello to a new interest rate and a new lower mortgage payment.

Other than the financial stuff, I have only managed to get some new pillows for the family, get the sheets changed, and get the next size baby clothes out and deployed for our growing youngest. I hope that by tomorrow I will get caught up with the laundry, and maybe finish weeding my strawberry bed. If I can get any real housecleaning done on Friday, that will be a substantial bonus, but I'm not counting on it. Frankly, I am more pleased with the financial stuff than I would be with dusted picture frames or sewed curtain pockets. Hopefully I can get some of that done too, or get my daughter's room better organized (which will mean moving some toys out). However, I am happy with the blend of relaxing and work that has constituted most of this week. Next week we are back to our regularly scheduled work program, but it's nice to feel that a spring break is actually a *break* and still productive. Now, time to figure out when to start the vegetable garden prep...