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For Yuna, we wound up borrowing most of what it cost to adopt her -- most on our house but some on credit cards, too, when the house equity wasn't enough to finish it off. We don't want to do that again -- I REALLY don't like owing money and debt makes me very nervous.
For #2, we want to have the money either entirely or mostly saved before beginning the process, so we don't have to worry about coming up with money mid-stream and delaying the process, so we're trying to save whatever we can in order to make this go as fast as possible.
We have moved to a smaller house, so we owe less on it. We sold our other house for quite a bit more than we owed, and used the extra money to pay off credit cards, medical bills, Yuna's adoption, and my car, as well as a personal loan my mom gave us. We didn't have much left over after all that, but the money we spent each month paying on those things now gets banked instead of going toward payments. Our new house does need some things (new carpet, paint, and a few other things) so we're saving for those, too.
Our utilities are less because our new house is smaller, so that's a little extra savings. We no longer have credit card debt outstanding -- we are paying off the bills each month. My car is now also paid for, and DH's only has a few more payments on it. We also use coupons for anything we can -- we figure every little bit helps. We buy almost all of Yuna's clothes used (Goodwill or Salvation Army, mostly), and many of her toys/books as well. We buy generics for a lot of things, especially if we don't have a coupon for the brand name and aren't picky about it.
I figure up at the end of the month how much "surplus" we have, and some of that stays in our checking account as a cushion. We plan to buy the things our house needs with this money, mostly. The rest (anything we can easily do without, so it varies month to month depending on our expenses) goes in savings. When the savings account balance reaches $500.00 (the minimum to buy a CD at our bank) then we buy the CD. We figure we'll just keep repeating that process until we have what we estimate we'll need then we'll begin.
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