G is 2 years and 4 months. I'm 28 and T is 30.

What age difference is between your children? (or you and your siblings?) I know there is no *right* answer, just wondering about other's thoughts.

We were waiting concerning trying for another kid until our debts were paid. So maybe August 2013? Assuming it takes 6 months, G could end up being almost 4 years older than her sibling.

I've never had an issue with this since my brother and I are 6 years apart and I feel reasonably close to him. We don't talk all the time but we're there for each other when we need it. T on the other hand is only 16 months apart from his sister and in the last 13 years I've known him they've never been close. I think it's more personality than age difference but who knows.

Something to mull over at least..

This month marks the 3rd full year with our 15-year mortgage. That means there's only 12 to go! There's moments where I wish we had stuck with the 30-year option, but luckily we have a decent income between the two of us that we were able to go with the speedier option.

What this means for our family: our lives won't be spent as a slave to a lender. G will have recently turned 14 when our loan is paid off. Because of cut-off dates, she'll most likely be in 8th grade. That leaves 4.5 years of extra boost to her college fund (we've already started contributing to a 529, but I'm sure we'll need more.)

Plus even if I were to get pregnant this second and have a child in 9 months (very happily still on the pill so that shouldn't be the case :P) our 2nd kid would be at the most 11 years old when the house is paid off. How neat is that?!

I'm excited to teach my child(ren) about the benefits of being money concious early on in life and hopefully they will learn from our mistakes but also from what we've done right.

Retirement accounts at age 30:

So I’ve heard the rule of thumb (yes I know you need to be careful with rules of thumb but I figure it’s a good baseline for right now until we know more about our needs in retirement) is that you should have a years worth of salary in retirement accounts by the time you’re 30. T is already 30 and I’m coming up on 29 in 4 months so I figured it was about time I evaluate things.

Turns out I can’t access one of his 401k account right now. We’ve been locked out so now T needs to call. A year or two ago the account was at 21k. If I assume no growth since then (which hopefully with all his contributions it should be at least a couple thousand) we have approx. 50k in investments. Our income is over 100k.

Honestly I thought we were doing better. But we are still fairly young and considering we only have 12 years left on our mortgage (and 20 on our investment property) things could be worse. The investment property is half in my name, half in my mothers. Once my brother gets settled she has always hoped to put him as a partial owner as well. If I sell half of my half to him the payments will be low enough that we will no longer need to rent the place out and instead we could all use it as a vacation home (it’s a condo on a lake and would be an ideal family summer house). Of course I can’t count on him being interested and I’m not sure of his money situation so that situation is very much in limbo right now. In the meantime we continue to rent the condo out.

As far as the mortgage is concerned we only have 12 years left. Right now we have 1,000 each month that we put towards debt. Over the past 4 years we’ve paid off credit cards, cars, student loans, etc., etc. The mudroom/1st floor bathroom addition really set us back last year. An estimated 8-10k cost ended up becoming 18k when all was said and done. Much of it was paid with cash. The rest was put on a 0% interest credit card and a 5k mom loan. The credit card will be paid off March 29th. Mom loan by August 2nd. At that point we will have 1,000 a month to do with as we please. I am planning on saving for maternity leave for a 2nd child. Then 300 or so of that 1,000 will need to go towards daycare. That’ll leave us with 700 a month.

What would you do with $700 a month?

I’m thinking of building a small emergency fund and then will start putting 300 to mortgage and the rest 400 to savings (for future cars, house maintenance, etc.) each month. Sorry for the scattered, rambling post. I really needed a monetary brain dump to lay all this out on the table and there it is. For now.