Our HELOC balance is under $20,000! We’ve had the HELOC since we bought our house in January 2003. We’ve never focused on paying it off – it’s an interest only loan, and we’ve just been stashing our money in the HELOC every time we get paid, and then when it’s time to pay bills, we take money out of the account. I haven’t paid our August mortgage or credit card bill yet, so the balance will increase by about $2700 next week. But until now, the lowest balance we’ve ever had in the HELOC before bills were paid was about $24000. So we’re headed in the right direction. It seems strange to look at our bank account info online and see a “1″ at the beginning of the HELOC balance. It makes me even more motivated.

I got my final paycheck from the library yesterday.  It was a good one, because I had more than 200 hours of vacation time saved up, and they cashed that out on my last check.  After taxes I ended up with over $2000, which is a good windfall.  Over the last year, I didn’t take any vacation time at all – I worked every shift I was assigned, and I also volunteered to be the person who goes in and empties the book drop and checks in books on holidays.  Every single holiday for the last year.  So instead of having to take vacation time for holidays, I was getting paid to work.  I did that because while I was pregnant, we weren’t sure if I was going to quit my job or not.  If I hadn’t quit, I wanted to have plenty of vacation time saved up for maternity leave and to be able to take days off to stay home with our baby after I went back to work.  Since I decided to quit instead, I just got a check for all the vacation time.  Makes all those holidays when I went in to empty the book drop seem very worth it now!

Anyway, I put $1000 of the money into my Roth IRA.  That’s the first money I’ve put into that account this year.  We plan to max it out, so we still have $4000 to go, but it feels good to have made a start.  The rest of the check will be going into our HELOC.  I’m really looking forward to getting the HELOC balance under $20K, and I’m hoping that will happen within the next couple months.  This will help.

We’ve added a new financial goal to our list. We want to install solar panels. We’ve been talking about it for years, but the price made the possibility unrealistic (at least $12,000 to put in enough panels to power our house, and even that would require that we cut back further on our electricity use). Last week, we decided that $12,000 only seems unrealistic because we’re looking at it as one big chunk. So we opened an ING account called “solar panels” and put $300 in it. We’ll be putting $300 into the account each month, until we have enough to install solar panels on our roof. Our other financial goals will still be priority – funding our IRAs and our HSA, paying off our HELOC, and funding our son’s 529 plan are all above the solar panels on our list. But we’re determined to make it work anyway. This year, we’ve already made the maximum contributions allowed to my husband’s IRA and to our HSA. We’re working on the HELOC every month (goal is for it to be gone in the summer of 2010). My IRA still needs $4000, but that will be a priority this fall. Our son’s college plan is set up with an automatic contribution every month. So even though it’s a lot to juggle, we’re feeling pretty on top of our various money goals. One more should be manageable.

I quit my job at the library in order to be home with our son – he now has two work-at-home parents. I’ll be going back on a very part time basis (12 – 16 hrs) in the fall, but for now all of our income comes from our insurance agency. Happily, we’ve been busier than ever this year, and our income is nearly at the same level as last fall, when I was working both jobs. I was putting 25% of my pay into a retirement account, so the take-home pay from the library job wasn’t too high anyway – we should be fine without it. But in the last few weeks, we’ve added $400 to our monthly money commitments ($100 for our son’s college fund, and $300 for the solar panels). So things will be pretty tight around here again. We don’t mind – we’ve been there before, when we were paying off debt. And it feels much better to be on a tight budget because we have lots of savings projects going on, than to be on a tight budget because we’re paying off debt.

Paid Twice started the idea of snowflaking, and it’s turned into a blizzard all across the pf blogosphere.  Since we’ve decided to buckle down and pay off our HELOC, we’ll be putting every little bit of money we can save into our HELOC.  We use Vonage for our phone service, and have been paying $31/month including taxes and fees.  Last week I got an email from them saying that we could pay for a year of service and save 20% on the total bill.  I called them today to get details, and it was a pretty simple process.  They charged our credit card for the year, and the total charge was $71 lower than the total we would have paid for 12 months if we had kept paying monthly the way we have been.  We’ve been very happy with Vonage, and I have no problem committing to a year with them – we’d have been with them either way, so we might as well get two months free.  So there’s $71 we can snowflake to our HELOC.