Financial To-Do List Update

Back in June I wrote about our financial to-do list and all of the things that we need to take care of.

Our number one priority was to get a will. We started working on it this week. We are using Suze Orman's Will & Trust kit that I purchased from her website. Once purchased, you log into your account and build your will and other important documents with her guidance. I have found it to be relatively easy to follow. Although, she highly stresses the importance of a revocable trust and I had never heard of this before. After I plugged in some of our data, the program recommended that we seek a lawyer based on the personal data that I entered. Now I need to read up on the revocable trusts to understand them fully. If we have to use a lawyer, so be it, but I want to check all of our options. I hear ka-ching, ka-ching in the background.

Some other things on our list were: reviewing our IRA asset allocation, updating our household to-do list, increase payments to my husband's student loan, start college funds for our girls and lastly increase our emergency fund. All of these things are important, but we have moved the emergency fund up in priority.

If you remember a few months ago, I wrote about the difficult time my husband's business was going through. He has worked extremely hard over the last few months to get it back on track and we are finally seeing some light at the end of the tunnel. But we had to dip into our emergency savings every month from March through June.

Thank goodness for emergency funds...can I hear an AMEN?!!

We now must rebuild the coffers. This has been the second time we have dipped into our emergency fund since 2006, so we realize the importance of having a fund. We try to live responsibly and frugally, but there isn't a lot of money at the end of the month to shift to our emergency fund. At least, at first glance. We need to review our budget categories and challenge ourselves to make some cuts. We have two budgets to review: our business and household.

I have some work to do, as usual, but this is the job that I have taken on in our family and business: money manager. I love my job and the challenges that are before me.

How are you doing on your financial to-do list? Are you making progress?

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Please note that this post is not an endorsement for Suze Orman's Will & Trust.