I’ve been keeping something from you. I was either not going to tell you at all or wait until it is a non-issue, but why have a personal finance blog and not be completely honest about personal finance, right?

We spent $6000 in April 2009 on a really nice bedroom set of furniture and a Tempurpedic mattress. I’ve mentioned this before, but I did not mention that we financed the whole thing for 15 months at 0% interest.

Normally, that would not matter to me since we would already have had the cash, put it aside, and made interest off of it for 14 months before paying the bill in full. BUT we didn’t have the cash except for in our emergency fund, so we’ve been putting $350 a month aside while paying $50 a month to the bill. The bill is due in August and the money is ready to go for July, but it’s been slightly nerve-wracking knowing I owe big money for something I’ve been sleeping on for more than a year.

I knew we would never have to pay any interest since our emergency fund would have had us covered, but I still feel a bit sheepish about the whole thing. If I had lost my job or if hubby had become disabled, we would have been in trouble. We wouldn’t have needed to do anything drastic, but it would have been severely uncomfortable.

The upside to this confession is that I can now tell you that as of next month, that $350 a month is open to play with. Our tax account for the year is also polished off since I highly overestimated our property taxes last year, so that’s an extra $400 a month till the end of the year as well. Hubby’s final $2000 grad school payment is also ready to go, so we no longer need to funnel that $625 a month into a grad school account.

In short, an extra $1375 a month has opened itself up from now until December, so it looks like our $9500 car loan will definitely be paid off by the end of this year. We will also be able to open a second 2010 Roth IRA, but it will be funded from November 2010 to March 2011. After that, we are discussing what to do with the extra. We will continue to fund a second Roth IRA, but that will still leave us about $1000 extra a month to put towards the house or the emergency fund or whatever.

Let’s just say that I’m pretty happy and you may want to be in the room towards the end of November when we make that final Prius payment.

What do you think? Were we nuts for taking on such a huge payment plan for bedroom furniture and a mattress? Should we be doing something different with the excess cash we have now?