Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Tax Refund Time! Help Us Get the Most Bang for Our Bucks

Each year we get around $2,200 back around tax time. I would love to hear some comments on what you think the smartest way to use our tax refund.

So far, we need to pay about $1,100 back to our family for generously loaning us the money to purchase a used car in excellent condition except for the fact that it needed a new motor (they fronted the money for the motor too). So that leaves a balance of about $1,100.

Options:

Could pay off my iphone balance of $366 and bring my cell phone portion of the montly bill to around $15 instead of the current $38. This would bring the total bill down which would make me feel better. But not as good as if the husband would worm his way out of his current iphone 6 lease deal with Sprint and go with Republic Wireless, for a total savings of $145/month. But I digress.

We could pay for the year's car insurance, thus bringing down our monthly expenses by $136 each month.

We could pay for two months' worth of rent, freeing up that money to get ahead a month or two on other bills.

We could pay for one full months' expenses all at once, putting us using the current month's income for next month's bills, like the YNAB budgeting software wants to get us to, which would be very nice.

We could put it towards any one of these three debts:

Motorhome (we might not do this since it's an interest free loan anyways)
Student loan debt (of 5,000)
Home Depot (760 balance, with six months interest free)

What would YOU do? Please post in the comments, come on! Don't be shy!!

2 comments:

  1. i would put the $$ to paying off the debt with the highest interest rate: be it mortgage, org credit card. and i would open a bank account for the kiddos and put some of that money there for educational purposes (not to mention that the interest rate on a kiddo account is: a) a little higher in general, and b) interest earnings are NON Taxable up to $1000 in interest. note: you do not want to accumulate TOO much $$ on the kiddo's bank account, or it might hurt their future financial aid.

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