Falling off the wagon

In spite of my good intentions with this blog, I have totally fallen off the wagon of posting regularly.  I could give you an arm's length list of excuses but instead I shall simply apologize for my absence and move along.  In addition to falling off the wagon in regards to my blog postings I have also fallen off the wagon of staying on a budget. 

My husband and I recently crossed our 3 year mark of proceeding through our Total Money Makeover.  We're still so far away from baby step 3, let alone becoming one of the ultra fiscally fit people we both long to be.  Again, I could provide the reasons why but it can mainly be summed up in one word we all understand, LIFE.

On the positive side, we looked into selling our condo in order to avoid the balloon payment on our mortgage next September, when I may or may not be unemployed and desperate. We went so far as putting it on the market and receiving an offer.  Luckily I spoke to my cousin and he encouraged me to look for other options with another financial provider.  I thought all financial institutions basically provide the same types of loans but I learned otherwise after a couple of phone calls.  My husband and I completed the paperwork for a Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC) last week.  We lowered our interest rate from 5.625% to 3.37% fixed.  Once it all goes through we'll have a HELOC payment of less than $200 a month and the piece of mind that we now have a fixed rate 10 year mortgage.  I'll have to take out my own property taxes but that's a small price to pay for this feeling of freedom from that balloon mortgage.  The closing costs were also only $250 which was the main reason we didn't refinance our mortgage before as we were quoted almost $5000 with our current mortgage provider. 

We were also clobbered with two huge car repairs this summer so our France vacation is becoming more and more like a pipe dream instead of a dream come true. We're determined we need to save up for a replacement vehicle if we come across one more bad car repair scenario (+$1000).  If we can avoid another huge repair we might yet get there although I'm not going to hope too hard for it.