Tax Refunds and Snowballing

Some financial updates (remember when I used to do those all the time?) as we count down toward tax filing deadlines:

1. Married taxes are harder than single taxes.
2. Registered Domestic Partnership (CA) taxes are harder than married taxes. (*grumble grumble equality grumble even Turbo Tax costs more grumble grumble file amended return GRUMBLE*)
3. Nonetheless, there's a benefit -- I got the largest refund of my working life this year, even after splitting it halfsies with my wife!

And it more than funded the rest of our emergency savings goal. Hooray!

So that meant I needed to find something to do with the cash I'd been socking away to the emergency fund every month. It's sort of like debt snowballing, only with savings. Once I hit a saving goal, I can stop putting money toward it and divert that money toward another goal (or a few, because I'm me and I always have a few projects going at once). Just have to set up the auto-transfers from my checking account.

Since repaying my grad school loans will be the most urgent goal this year (they'll go into repayment in November, and I would like to be able to clear them in full then), I applied a large chunk of the former emergency savings payment to my grad school fund (along with the regular monthly transfers I already have, and the "snowflakes" I get from Amazon sales, etc.). Then I increased the amount we're saving for our adoption fund, and added a smallish monthly transfer to the pet medical care fund, which had been sitting with only the opening balance in it.

Former monthly emergency savings transfer split this way:

55% GRAD SCHOOL

35% ADOPTION

10% PET MEDICAL CARE

Once grad school loans have all been paid off, I'll have a sizable amount of money left over from my paychecks (assuming, of course, that my employment situation is all the same and we haven't had to use the emergency fund). I think I'll end up splitting that evenly between our big 2014 goals: the adoption fund and the vacation fund. And once those are met, I think it'll be time to boost retirement savings.