Checking in: our financial journey with Huntington

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This post is brought to you by The Huntington National Bank and The Motherhood. All opinions are my own.

It’s December already, can you believe it? This year is just flying by. Our weather here in Ohio feels like winter has arrived, I have a kid who just celebrated his sixth birthday and we’re in the middle of the holiday hustle and bustle. The fourth quarter of the year is always my favorite. I love the chilly fall air, leaves changing colors and knowing that I have a few months left to work on this year’s business and life goals. 

Baby girl will be here any day now, too. I imagine that the beginning of 2020 will be a little crazy, adjusting to being a family of five, so I’m trying my hardest to get a handle on my to-do list and making sure we’re staying on track. In one of my previous blog posts, I talked about our family’s financial goals, and how we’ve worked hard to build up our emergency fund and save up for the future. I wanted to give you all a quick update on how things are going so far.

Related: Dreaming big and setting goals: working with Huntington Bank to make it happen

Firstly, I’m so excited to share with you that we paid off our adoption loan! If you remember, Caleb’s adoption happened a lot faster than we had anticipated. We decided to open up a home equity line of credit so that we could have funds available as we needed them. For the past two years, we’ve been working hard to bring in additional income that we could use to pay off the loan. 

Now that we’ve done this, we can take what was our loan payment and put the money towards our savings goals using Huntington’s Savings Goal Getter^SM tool. Freeing up these funds will allow us to reach our goals more quickly. It’s so fun to see the progress we’re making each month. 

Related: Saving with purpose: intentional financial planning with less stress

Speaking of savings goals progress, we’ve pretty much met our savings goal for a new car. I’ve gotten more used to the idea of owning a minivan, especially after test driving a few. Now the hard part is just looking for the right deal to come along. If you have any car-buying tips to share, I’d love to hear them. 

Our house hunt has stalled a little since we’re into the school year. We’re still looking in case the perfect house comes along, but the house inventory is low and things are still selling fast. Plus, I have mixed feelings about moving school districts mid-year. In the meantime, we’re focused on that house fund we set up in our Savings Goal Getter. As great as it would be to have that additional bedroom before baby girl arrives, I’m thankful that we have more time to increase our down payment. 

What I’m most excited about is that we’ve finally finished moving all our accounts over to Huntington Bank. Since we’ve lived in several different places over the years, we’ve ended up with a bank account here, money market account there…you get the idea. Just having everything housed in one place makes it so much easier to see the full picture of our finances. Side note – it was super easy to start the process at our local Huntington Bank branch, even with a toddler in tow. 

We’ve already got the Spend Analysis tool set up to see how we’re spending, but one thing I’m really excited about is seeing the Spend Setter ^SM tool, in action over the holidays. I’m generally pretty good at sticking to our budget the majority of the year, but I really struggle with this through the fall and the end of the year. I get caught up in all the baking and holiday meals, so it’s very easy for me to overspend what we’ve budgeted for groceries. I also struggle with sticking to our budget when it comes to Christmas shopping. 

If you haven’t checked out the Spend Setter^SM tool yet, it’s a feature that allows you to set up a limit of how much you want to spend each month on things like groceries, dining out, and shopping. You can even include subcategories, like what you’re spending on coffee (my personal downfall, since this adds up quickly). Spend Setter tracks your spending against the limit your set and then sends you a Huntington Heads Up^® alert (message and data rates may apply) to let you know if you’re on track, approaching the limit, or are over budget. 

The money is yours, obviously, so there’s nothing keeping you from spending more or less if you want. But it does a great job at keeping you informed along the way. For instance, we spent more money on clothing in August when the kids went back to school. Huntington Heads Up was a good reminder that, although the spending was intentional, we should spend less on clothing the next couple of months. 

These alerts can be sent to you via text, e-mail, or push notification (or all three). They’re also totally customizable for when you’d like to receive them. I get alerts to keep me posted on our budget progress when we’ve spent 50%, 75% and 100% of our budget category through the month. These alerts help me to gauge where we’re at so I can adjust accordingly. I also have it set up to alert me when we’re spending more than we typically do in an average month. 

How are you doing on your savings goals so far this year? Which of Huntington’s financial tools would be the most helpful for your own finances? I’m always happy to chat about our experience banking with Huntington or answer any questions. You can also find more information here. 

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