February Unusual Spending Recap

Overall, I feel like we did pretty well in February. Whether or not that’s really the case will be determined by how we did on estimating and covering our unusual spending for February.

Here is what I wrote about our expected unusual spending for the month of February.   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.

And here’s how we did…

We did plan dinner for the night of her dress rehearsal which kept us from going out to eat. It was a small savings, but a savings nonetheless. It took planning and a little help from The Husband to make it happen, but we did it.

Our trip to Las Vegas for The Girl’s dance competition went pretty well. In fact, I was so pleased with how well we did that I wrote a whole post about doing Las Vegas on the Cheap. Obviously, we spent money, but overall we kept our spending to a minimum.

Baseball was a little pricier than I anticipated. However, even with that, we have been able to cash flow a lot of The Boy’s baseball needs. This year, The Boy needed: a new bat, cleats, pants, batting gloves, and a helmet. We did have some money in our kids’ activities envelope that paid for his cleats and batting gloves. Also, The Husband had some overtime on his last pay period which netted us about $100. This paid for The Boy’s bat and a little towards his helmet. We ended up being about $50 short for everything we needed, but that was actually better than I expected. Now that our kids’ activities envelope is down to $0, we will have to start building it up again. We shouldn’t need too much in that category for a few months. Hopefully it will give us time to get a little cushion in there.

We did attend a Warrior’s game in February and it was fantastic! The Kids had a blast and we were able to keep spending to a minimum! With the tickets The Kids got for Christmas, they each got something to wear to the game. We ate dinner at home before we left for the game and then treated them each to a cotton candy while we were there. The most expensive part of the night was paying for parking: $40!!! The Husband used his gas money to pay for that so we didn’t have anything extra “out of pocket”.

Each of The Kids did get a haircut in February and those were both covered by money in our “hair” envelope. Going forward, we will continue to fund this at $50 per month. That should be enough to keep up on paying for The Kids.

Overall, spending for February was held in check. I’m definitely counting this month as a win! Here’s to hoping for more months like this!