Our financial savings goals for 2013.

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Happy New Year, everybody!  How was your day?? Today we spent a whole lotta time putting Christmas stuff away. But I'm happy to bring back my spring-y decor again:

I had a nice chat with my parents through Oovoo ( it's kind of like Skype but you can actually see yourself too. And you get less dropped calls with them). It's amazing how far technology has come just in the past few years! As much as I miss being close to my parents, being able to talk to them and see them through the screen of my computer is the next best thing that I could never even dream of ten years ago!

Another thing we did today was to sit down and finally take a hard look at our finances and goals. We have a few categories we want to save for this year. Unfortunately, we are still not sure exactly what our income will be like in the upcoming months but we hope to be able to save thanks to bonuses, challenges (like January no-spend challenge ) and my part time gig.

So here's what we are saving for: 

Vacation fund. As I mentioned in my yearly goals, we want to have a small family vacation this year and go to Bear Lake again and then Hubby and I want to spend a couple of days in Vegas. We want to save about $1200 for both trips. It's a generous amount, and I really hope we will need a lot less but I still want to save that much just in case.

Baby fund. And no, it's not an announcement!! I'm not pregnant! But we are thinking about it. Our "baby" is no baby any more. He's turning 3 in two months. And we've been thinking long and hard that we want another child. It's not an easy decision for me, and not just financially. I have a medical condition called PUPPS. I'm basically allergic to being pregnant ( if you want to know more, read here or just Google it). I have a severe case. With my last pregnancy I had a rash everywhere but my face and chest area. And until I got PUPPS, I had no idea what itching really means! Believe me, it's BAD. The biggest problem is that it's fairly rare and neither of my two OBGYNs knew anything about it. But finally I found a more experienced doctor and read an enormous amount of articles etc. etc. on it. So I have my hopes. We just feel that there's another little one waiting to join our family, and I rely on God to help me through it. PUPPS is not my only problem but I will tell you more about it some other time. So we want to save $3500 (out of pocket maximum) for it.

Christmas fund. Last year we saved $550 for Christmas and we blew our budget. We were only about $40 short but I didn't have to mail a package to my family because they were here. This alone would cost me at least $70. So we want to bump it to $700 this year.

Car fund. Even though we have an emergency fund, I would love us to have a separate car fund where we can track all of the car expenses, planned and not. Just two days ago our minivan started making funny noises, and within a few hours we paid $110 in repairs. It wasn't a big thing but the part wasn't cheap. So I want to have a set amount for surprises like this plus for registrations, inspections and emissions, oil changes and so on. We hope to have $1000 in this account if possible.

So these are our financial goals. It's a lot. I'm not even sure if it's realistic. But it helps me to have visual goals because it gives perspective.