March Unusual Spending Recap

So, how did we do? Okay, not horribly, but not great, either.

Let’s start at the beginning.

March is always an interesting month for us. Most of our dance payments for The Girl are taken care of, we’ve already paid for The Boy’s baseball, but it’s also The Husband’s birthday month, and this year he turns 40! In addition, we have a foreign exchange student coming to live with us for a week and with that we are hosting a potluck at our house welcoming all the kids from Japan. We will be holding family birthday parties at our house this month. Lastly we have two car registrations due for the month of March.

I did buy my husband the tool he wanted. It ended up costing about $200. I had an Amazon gift card for about half the amount and I charged the remainder. (Our debt total did not go up, but I didn’t have enough money to pay for it outright. I should have planned better.) I still haven’t worked on the second present as time is a major issue. I’m hoping to set aside a little money each month to help pay for that one.

We did host The Husband’s birthday party for family at our house and we did pay for the food out of our normal grocery budget. I wish I had remembered the party and padded my grocery budget applicably. (Note to self, add $100 per paycheck to grocery budget for May birthdays!) Overall, we are actually running a $20 shortage on groceries, in part due to March birthdays and in part due to our exchange student. Overall, I’m not unhappy with how the food and food budget went for the month.

Our time with our exchange student has come and gone and ended up not being nearly as expensive as I expected. We did buy her lobster and beef (which accounts for the overages in our grocery budget) but other than that our expenses for her were minimal.  While in America, she became homesick and didn’t want to do much. We scrapped plans for our fancy dinner as she ate like a bird and was exhausted. We did take her to the zoo but we had a free pass which included parking and admission for two kids and two adults. When we went to go pay for our exchange student, the cashier told us she had some free entrance tickets that people hadn’t used all of so she got in free too. That night for dinner, she chose KFC… cheap and easy. The potluck went really well and we didn’t need to buy much, only paper plates and lemonade mix, so it was pretty inexpensive too. We actually had a new bag of cups, napkins, and plenty of silverware.

We did pay both of our car registrations in the ways I expected to: from our annual expenses account and with our checking account buffer. Somehow, that buffer has built back up a little bit again (not on purpose) so we are going to use it for some unusual expenses in April.

I have already written a rough draft of our unusual spending for April and I am making plans to actually figure out how to fund the needed expenses. As always, wish me luck.