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.