Unusual Spending for February

Hello and welcome back to my “unusual spending” series…

No excuses, life got busy and budgeting and careful spending went by the wayside; but I am trying to get back on track. To that end, I want to start looking at our unusual spending each month so that I can plan better for it.

In February, The Girl has a dance dress rehearsal and a competition in Las Vegas. The Boy will be starting baseball. We bought The Kids tickets to a Warriors game for Christmas and so that happens in February too. Other than that, our month will be pretty normal: haircuts, family birthdays, and life.

The Girl has a dress rehearsal for her dance season that is beginning. We will need to figure out dinner for that night for her and me. I might throw something in the crock-pot that day and then The Husband can bring it down to us (the rehearsal is just across town) and we wouldn’t have to buy dinner that night. That’s a good idea, but it takes planning ahead! Maybe now that I’ve thought about it, I’ll be able to execute it!

We paid for the first day of our Vegas stay but will still have to pay for the remaining two nights. I have not talked to The Husband about this yet, but I want to bring a lot of food with us to Vegas. I want to bring our breakfasts, lunches and snacks; that way, we will only have to buy dinner. That will not only decrease our costs, but it will be more convenient too because we don’t know The Girl’s schedule yet and sometimes at competitions we don’t have enough time to go and get something to eat. Better still; any food we bring will come out of our grocery budget so we will have the cash for that on hand. I’m hoping to keep costs for this trip down to a minimum.

For Christmas, we bought The Kids (and us too) tickets to a Warriors game. They are uber excited, and mama is too! With their ticket, each kid got a shirt to wear to the game. I don’t plan to buy them a souvenir there, but we will need to get dinner on that night. I’m hoping we can grab something quick and inexpensive to take with us.

Our extra spending for the month will make it difficult to meet our goal of paying off a minimum of $605 in principal towards our debt. Most of what we will pay for the month will actually go towards those charges, but I’m not going to stop trying!