MOe here…

It may be no secret to many of you, if you are in our Penny Forward Facebook group, that a huge goal of mine was to pay down my mortgage to the point of the mortgage insurance dropping off our monthly payments. We, and by this I mean my husband and I, had set a SMART goal to have this done by my birthday in Oct. We also have some other goals set that I wanted to try doing a few new things with. This is how we got to the CD (certificate of deposit,) discussion.

Last year I was able to get money moved over from a terrible interest rate account, into a money market account. It still is not the highest interest rate out there, in fact it is quite low. However, my family prefers to do banking with physical locations and this means we don’t get the best rates typically. We are making small steps into a better direction with our finances.

This money market account holds a few more general amounts in it that we don’t need right away. This includes our funds to take our, will be graduating senior, to visit my family in Chile next March. As we are still 6 months out from buying plane tickets for this, which is about 2/3^rd of the expense we will have, I saw our bank offer a 6 month CD. We had been discussing putting the money in a CD since we came up with the plan of traveling, but had yet to do it. This weekend I was finally ready to take the next step and earn a little more interest on this money that is just sitting aside but will be needed sooner than later.

Tying up money that we can’t just go out and get if we need it is a big concern for my husband, which is one reason it took us so long to get here. It also doesn’t help that after running the numbers the interest amount was less than $135. Don’t get me wrong $135 is still great for our money over 6 months, but it just doesn’t cover much. Maybe some food in the airport, flying to Chile is not a short flight.

We were actually getting in the car to go open the CD’s and that $135 number kept looking me straight in the face. I sat there wondering why is this nagging at me so much, and then it hit me. I realized that $135 number is the amount we are currently paying every month on the mortgage insurance. So why were we going to move money aside somewhere for 6 months to not even reach that, when we could use 1/5^th of that amount and get rid of $135 a month for the whole year leading up to the trip. This concept was much easier for my husband to attach to, and there we went in the opposite direction to go pay down my mortgage instead of getting CD’s.

So, GOAL REACHED!

We actually ended up doing both things. It may mean things get tight when we start planning our summer vacation things. When we do start paying and planning those summer things we may do a little more rolling with the punches then I had previously intended, but in a year, we will end up so much further ahead.

It really is amazing what doors you may find open, even if it’s not the door you were looking for. We knew we wanted our money to do more for us, and when we opened our mind to other ways to have that happen, we found ways for it to do much more for us. We went from earning not even $135 on the money we had set aside, to making $1750 by just adjusting what and where the money was actually coming from.