$11.52 Towards a New Home!

I have a jar on my desk, one of those ceramic ones you find in gift stores. The one's that have little messages written on them. Mine says 'Hopes & Dreams.' It's got a whopping $11.52 in it. That's pretty pathetic.
My wife and I don't really care for where we're living right now. It's twenty miles outside of the city we both work in (and therefore travel to every day). We don't really like the schools either, so we want out before our children are old enough to start school. The jar on my desk will be our ticket out of here.
It's a long road from $11.52 to the big numbers we need to build our next one. We can discuss our housing plans later, but lets just say that we need about $80,000 - $90,000 down for the next house.
This is somewhat contrary to my previous post concerning our goals. For starters, this wasn't one of the goals. Second, we'd be taking on a $400,000-$450,000 mortgage, which would put a serious cramp in our ability to grow the million dollars we wanted. It still fits inline with the net worth goal, since the home would be a $400,000 asset. But I wanted the bulk of our money to be a little more liquid.

Show me the money.

I'm currently dumping information into Quicken, finally. I didn't realize all the other features it has. I've been putting together spreadsheets to estimate expenses and income and tons more stuff for the past couple of months. Low and behold, Quicken can do pretty much all of it, if you just look around. I'm sure if I took the time to read the manual, I'd be able to spot those capabilities much sooner, but as of yet, I haven't (and probably won't). So, one I get all this good stuff put into Quicken, I'll shoot out my Net Worth report. I can't wait to get everything in there, it will make the 'snapshot' of our finances so much easier.

Still Here

Only one post last month. That's pretty weak. We're still here with much to talk about, just haven't posted anything lately. Stay tuned, we have quite a few things going on. My wife's first paycheck has arrived, we're looking into credit counseling and lots more. Tax planning is my big item for 2009, so I'll have plenty to post on that issue soon. We haven't quit!