"Dear Moxie, Welcome to Brokesville. Population: You."

I have a spreadsheet upon which I have tracked monthly balances since 2012. I should really be tracking year-to-year, instead of month-to-month, if I want some meaningful analysis. This month's special expenditures: annual license tabs, insurance for vehicle, oil change for vehicle, IKEA*, back to school supplies, running shoes, child's passport.

My cash reserves are $1000 down from last month.

The spending is not over yet. We donated old clothes that no longer fit us. I will have to buy some new clothes, but probably new-to-us from consignment, unless they are boys' clothes or sleepwear or shoes.

I did very well on food budgeting. Shifting to a 25% meat, 75% plant food plan, with more nuts and seeds for protein, has been good for my energy levels as well. I was bad and had four pops this month, one of them a beguiling Wink Martindale's Orange Passionfruit Guava concoction. On the other hand, I was good and found two local, independent places where my family could eat tasty dinners for under $10/plate.

My anxieties are concentrated around the anticipated expenditures for a child who has waded into the puberty pool. Three-inch vertical growth year-to-year, check; foot size that of mom's, check; passing out in the middle of the day, check; zits, check! Puberty, I relearn, is a time of uneven physical development. The child has a waist circumference probably six inches smaller than his inseam. Food and clothing expenditures will increase. I might have to alter some long pants. I wonder if there's a budget Sudanese or Swedish men's clothing outlet I could order from. Another complexity is our school district's dwindling transportation budget: no bus service unless the student's residence is two miles away from the school. Last year he qualified for bus service without a change in residence or school location. Our proximity to the school is just over one mile, or twenty blocks. Not a problem for an active middle-schooler. 302 ft elevation to 79 ft elevation morning walk: 79 ft to 302 ft elevation climb in the afternoon, about 37 degree grade incline for 2500 ft. His lung capacity will be outstanding.

If someone has experience with a free personal finance management package for Linux, please tell me about it.

*IKEA is furniture pr0n for me. The place where I take my vehicle for oil changes had the 2015 Catalog until the office manager offered to me. How could I refuse? My house-swap adventure of three weeks ago showed me how other people use IKEA to organize their kitchens and bathrooms and my kitchen and bathroom sure could use organizing... I spent only $125 THIS VISIT. We go once a year at the most, because parking is a hassle. My stupid purchase was a solar-powered lamp that gives 3 hours of light after its solar panels absorb 12 hours of sunlight. It's stupid because I live in the northern hemisphere, closer to the Arctic Circle than the Tropic of Cancer. It was portable, pretty, red, half-price, under ten dollars and I didn't know it was solar-powered.

Thank you for your sweet welcome. I look forward to gleaning and sharing with you!

I'm here at Saving Advice because most of my savings, investment, and debt repayment strategies and practices are moribund, weak, tepid and minimal. I'm not in a position where I can ply extreme strategies (live in the woods! trap your food! bicycle everywhere in a flat landscape! turn the heat off in January!). It's hard for me to pay attention to so many accounts. I don't always save more than I spend every month.
These are my challenges.

I would like to accelerate my debt pay-off and increase my taxable stock account balances, but right now it seems to me I can do one but not both.

My mortgage and car loans are both accelerated; that is, they will be paid off before the original amortization term. My home equity line of credit will be paid off after the first mortgage if I don't accelerate it. I'd like to pay the HELOC off before the first mortgage is finished, otherwise I'll have such an anticlimax. Not so much a mortgage-burning happy dance, but a shoegaze shuffle to Slint or Stars of the Lid.

Right now, I keep about twelve mortgage payments' worth of cash. This cache covers my car insurance, license tabs, utility bills, living expenses and debt payments. I have a spreadsheet for tracking the balances for these categories. When my cash exceeds 12 mortgage payments, I divide the difference into investment cash and debt repayment. The problem is the difference is usually less than $20, so the investment cash doesn't go far. The instant gratification goes to seeing some 3% or 2.79% loan decrease.

On payday $910 goes into the checking account, the rest into the money market account. Any cash left over from the last spending period goes to the credit card, which usually has a balance under $300, but is paid in full habitually.

There'll come a day when the sum balance of my home equity line of credit and my car loan will be less than my cash-on-hand: will it be worth it to pay off one loan, even if it means not having twelve months' mortgage available? Should that loan to pay off be the one that's a depreciating asset, or the one with the highest interest rate? The loan with the highest monthly payment, or the loan with the most cumulative interest?

I keep thinking there's a black belt or red belt way of making the most of a slender surplus. That's why I joined the Saving Advice community: to see how people with slender surpluses manage their amounts. I am doing things right, but not wonderfully.