Today is a fabulous day

After several setbacks in our refinancing saga, we closed on our loan today - at 3.75% fixed for 30 years. AWESOME. I've never been so excited to pay off bills. As of next Wednesday, Jay and I will have $0 in consumer debt, have the funds available to finish our house (HVAC, crawlspace insulation, new shed/shop, privacy fence), have 4 months worth of emergency savings, and last but not least will have our Australia/New Zealand trip paid for. Oh, and did I mention that the refinance will also be saving us $500 a month? So with our new savings plan, we will be socking away 10% of our income, which we should really be doing anyway. We had been doing a great job with our savings, but car repairs or other unexpected expenses would always chip away at the account. My 401k is also quite happy these days. Financial stability is feeling mighty great.

To save even more, we've been thinking of getting rid of DirecTV, but our favorite shows are on SyFy, which doesn't work well with Hulu Plus or Netflix. Rather annoying. In three more years, we will also have paid off our DR timeshare (although I expect that we'll get suckered into the next level when we go back) and Jay's student loan will also be paid off, saving us even more money each month. We're keeping his student loan since the interest rate is so low.

I'm also getting a massage after work (a gift from one of my coworkers that I finally booked - great timing!)... plus Jay and I are going out to dinner to celebrate our loan closing! 

I've lost 8 pounds so far on Atkins. Not as much weight as I was hoping to lose in a month, but it's progress. I'm hoping to lose at least 16 pounds before our trip. However, as long as I lose at least 12 pounds before May, I will be back within "normal" limits. To weigh what I did when Jay and I started dating, I will need to lose about 25 more pounds. However, I would be happy with a 23.1 BMI (losing an additional 18 lbs or total weight loss of 26 lbs).

That's it for now! Hope to post about some of our New Zealand activities over the weekend. :)

 

Before and After

We are nearly done. I am beyond exhausted and hurt all over.

There was a mad rush to get everything done this weekend - getting the porch painted to improve curb appeal, straightening the yard, painting trim in the house, straightening, dusting, sweeping, mopping, shining, staging. You would not believe how filthy the house was - and I feel like we just cleaned it! Constant construction = constant dirt and dust. Jay had to work yesterday, so I busted my ass from the time I got up to the time I crawled into bed. We had hoped to finish the stairs, but at 10 pm last night, I gave up. The steps still needed to be sanded before we stain and poly them and there was no way I had another 2 hours in me. Overall, we spent 51 man hours from Friday through Sunday working on our project. Jay spent 21 hours between Friday and Saturday, I spent 27 hours between Friday and Sunday, and my girlfriend Angela came over and helped us paint for about 3 hours on Saturday.

Why the mad rush? Our house is being appraised today for refinancing. When my dad died, I inherited a substantial sum of money. However, since he wasn't planning on dying anytime soon, the majority of the money was in an IRA. I don't think he knew much about how IRA's work, because the money that he had inherited from my grandparents was all in cash, which he converted to the IRA. Since I wasn't a surviving spouse, nor of retirement age, I took a HUGE hit on taxes, which left me with less than half of the original amount. I won't lie - I spent about half of the remainder on a ring to wear in my dad's memory, furnishing my Odenton apartment, paying the disparity in rent between what I was putting in to make up for my ex not making much money, Ann Taylor clothes for work (and good makeup & skincare products) and took some nice vacations with the ex (which was also mostly on my dime). The rest of the money went to dumpster rental and some emergency repairs with the house, mainly the roof and porch to the tune of $30,000. By the time I met Jay, most of the money was gone - so I had to take out a home equity line of credit for the actual rehab project. And of course aforementioned rehab project ended up taking more time and costing way more than what I took out from the HELOC. So that is the long story short of why we are refinancing. Once the new conventional mortgage is in place, we will be saving almost $500 a month - or more, if the appraiser gives us a better LTV (loan to value).

Add all of this work to the Atkins diet that I started last Wednesday? My body is screaming for more nourishment. I probably should have eaten more this weekend, but we were so busy. The thing that I've noticed about Atkins is that I'm not as hungry, and things with the least number of carbs suddenly tastes ultra sweet. We had green beans on Saturday and they tasted sugary to me. Weird! So that's going pretty well, but I need to force myself to eat more often. Today is day six and I feel pretty shaky this morning. I'm sure it's because I didn't eat enough this weekend and I put my body through hell.

Unfortunately I don't have photos of every room for the before comparison.

So, without further ado... I give you the final comparison (and some in-between) photos:

Not too shabby, eh? :)

The chicken decision... do clucks save bucks?

Thanks to my dear friend Angela over at Hot Frugal, I've been thinking lately if having chickens might save us money. Having chickens didn't start as a money-saving endeavor for me. I'd been checking out My Pet Chicken for probably a year and thought that they would be fun pets and that having fresh eggs was a nice side benefit, especially since I love to cook.

So back to my question - Does raising your own chickens for eggs save money? Probably not in the short term, but over the long term... perhaps.

We can count on 9 of our chickens to be good layers... anywhere from 4-7 eggs per week. Let's say they end up on the low side of things and lay 4 eggs per week. That's 3 dozen eggs! Fortunately I do eat a fair amount of eggs and do quite a bit of cooking. We are also planning to give eggs away to our friends... we'll consume anywhere from a dozen to 18 eggs a week, depending on how much we cook.

Free range eggs from a local company in the area sell for $2.50 for small, up to $4.50 for jumbo eggs. By everything I've read, our chickens will lay large to extra large eggs, which sell for $3.50 to $4 a dozen. We'll use the conservative estimate... $3.50 per dozen eggs, times 3... $10.50 a week. That's $546 a year! Of course, we won't be selling them, but that is what they are worth.

I'm also not expecting to get as many eggs during the winter and molting times, so we'll cut that down to 35 weeks of 3 dozen eggs instead of 52. Still, that is $367.50 worth of savings.

Now, how much did all of this *actually* cost?

That is a more complicated question. The initial set-up involved about $50 worth of supplies... brooder bulb and light, feeders, chick starter, bedding, etc.

The chicks themselves - cost $5 a piece for the black stars, $2.75 for the red pullets and $1.99 a piece for our straight run bantams (silkies). So we ended up paying $39.98 for our 11 chickens.

Materials for the coop building (including paint) came to about $150. We also bought some wire fencing to build the run and some plastic fencing and u-posts for a temporary run, which ended up totaling around $50. We are constructing their run out of pallets, which we snagged for free in the industrial park. We were able to save some money as well by using some items that we already had on hand, or inexpensive hardware that we bought at the local ReStore (the Habitat for Humanity store) for a steal - $1 hardware that could cost $5-$10 elsewhere.

Feed costs anywhere from $16-$20 for a 50 lb bag, which I'm guessing will last about a month. Chickens can also have table scraps and will forage for greens and bugs. They go crazy for anything creepy crawly. Once we let them out to forage more, we will probably save on our food costs.

I'm sure that I'm missing a few things, but that is the bulk of it. So right now, we're looking at an initial investment of just under $300.

However, this would cost other people an awful lot more if they didn't build their own coop - to answer this question properly also involves your experience and knowledge of power tools.

During the last week, our nail gun started malfunctioning and the trigger fell off the reciprocating saw while Jay was using it, locking it into the ON position. This can be quite dangerous!

Yesterday, I cut my wrist on a nail in a pallet. If it had been slightly lower or if the nail had been sharper, that would have been an interesting trip to the ER. Not to mention that I was covered in red paint, so it might have been a bit alarming to the staff. At least I knew that my boss was working the afternoon shift, and he also knows that I'm building a chicken coop. If he hadn't known, they might have shipped me off to the looney bin for trying to slit my wrist with a rusty nail. Don't worry, I'm up to date on my tetanus shot!

So if you're not a savvy builder or have to take a trip to the ED, that obviously will make the cost of owning chickens much higher. Most coops that you can buy online for 12 chickens will run over $800. Building it yourself will definitely save a lot of money.

Next year I may try hatching out some chicks. My boss's wife has an incubator that he's volunteered to let me borrow, so I'm thinking of ordering some fertilized eggs online and hatching out some other breeds... Easter Eggers or Ameracauna type chickens that will produce funky colored eggs, more specifically. So depending on how many hatch, we will probably sell some chicks and then keep a few, depending on how many chickens we have to replace. Hopefully all of my 11 will survive the next year, but I have to be realistic... there are a lot of feral cats in the neighborhood and I'm sure that we'll lose a couple.

With all of that said, we will probably be breaking even, or maybe even saving a little bit of money with our chickens. If we keep them for a few years, we will be saving money for sure.

Of course there are plenty of other reasons to keep chickens... fertilizer, pest control (they love to eat fleas and ticks), plus they are just plain fun to watch. They all have different personalities and can keep me entertained for hours with their antics.

I'm very happy that we have them and I'm sure I'll be even happier once they start rewarding me with fresh eggs! :)