It's that weird time of year where not much big is happening, but we're busy doing a ton of little, time-consuming things, like running pre-Christmas, pre-houseguest errands.

I feel like I'm on constant deadlines. Getting the ham for Xmas dinner, making sure we drop off all of the gifts for the families we adopted for Christmas on time, the giving trees, the school (needy family) donation drop offs, then making sure all the teacher gifts are made and delivered on time. Now, it's the last day of school before winter break, and it's time to get ready for another round of houseguests. (We host both Thanksgiving and Christmas, because hubby is an only child, my sister is single with no kids, and hubby's family is always coming to stay with us. ) It's exhausting!

Christmas and December seemed much more relaxing when I was a kid/ before I had kids. It's hard being Santa!

I haven't even thought about New Years' goals. I suppose it will be more of the same. Try to stick to a budget, try to pay off the house, save for retirement, save for college, etc. Same old same old!

We were talking about the mortgage though. If Hubby gets a bonus and we get a tax refund, we might consider draining the savings account just to pay off the balance and be done with it. Then, we'd just work hard to build up the savings account. There are a lot of ifs, but we'll see how it all plays out between now and April 15.

The last mortgage payment of the year has hit, and we now officially owe:
$23,570.13.

I'm so amped. Our goal was to get to $27,500 by the end of the year, but by some miracle, we managed to get below that.

The grand total paid off the balance this year was....$17,611.61

Hazzah! We really might get this place paid off in 2017!