Monthly Income

Here is an idea of what we have to work with.  My husband is salaried, so his income does not change.  My income is variable because I'm hourly and sometimes work overtime.

Here is what November looked like:

Husband's income: $3624.90
My income: $2274.52
Total: $5899.42

I had some good paychecks last month since I worked a lot of overtime. So, these results are not typical. I make around $1760 if I don't work any overtime.

I just started my job in August.  Before then I was working odd temporary jobs - actually my current job is also temporary as well. But, this is the first job I've had for a while where I'm making decent money (this time last year I was working a seasonal job at a busy retail store - hopefully I won't have to do that again). Anyway, before I started this job, we could get by on just my husband's income.  So technically all my income should be used to pay down our mortgage debt.  However, my husband has other plans. He bought an iPad this month, last month he bought a new couch, the month before that he hired someone to paint some rooms in our house, and the month before that we had new carpet installed. Now our house looks better, but it was expensive. I did manage to start investing a little bit of money into my Roth IRA, and paid probably $1000 towards the small mortgage, so I'd still like to be making faster progress.