Telling Your Money Where To Go...

I read in Dave Ramsey's book Total Money Makeover that having a budget was telling your money where to go, not wondering where it went.

Now that we've finally paid off that last credit card we're looking at where that money should go now.  We still have my student loan, should we throw all our weight against that?

What about our Emergency Savings? We've got the Dave-Ramsey-suggested $1,000 in an account, but realistically we want to have a cushion of about $12,000 in there.

Then there's the thought that pretty soon we're probably going to have to sell one of our cars (I vote for Matt's, I'm too attached to mine) for one that will last us longer.

There's also the good argument that we're young and without kids and now is the time to see the world! Labor Day is coming up and we want to get out of town and explore this state a bit!

Oh, and not to mention that Christmas will involve a bit of traveling this year and, let's face it, Christmas is just always expensive no matter how hard you try! I just keep seeing that perfect gift for people!

So do we split up our extra income or throw it all against one thing? If we threw it all at the student loan it would still take us about a year to pay it off, and by that time (hopefully) there will be a little one on the way and flying to Paris for a week will be a lot more difficult.

So for right now, we're splitting it all up. A good chunk is going to the student loan, another good chunk towards the Emergency Savings, but we've also got a Travel & Gifts savings account for Christmas and other trips. We opened an ING checking account with the free $50 bonus and are using that to slowly begin saving for a car...we want to pay for the whole thing up front rather than having a car payment.

When you put all your extra money towards one thing it seems to go quickly (well, maybe not quickly but faster). Splitting it up makes it feel like each goal is going to take forever. I guess there's no perfect solution, but that's ours at the moment.

Where do you throw your money's weight? Debt? Savings? Fun?