Money In and Money Out

Until a recent conversation with The Husband, I didn’t realize how much money was outstanding that is owed to us.

I saw a charge for $100 on our credit card (made by The Husband) that I asked him about. He told me that was for a ticket change we had to make with our season tickets to the theater and that because we had to change from a Friday night to a Saturday night, there was an upcharge of $25 per ticket… so my sister and her husband owe us $50 for that.

We also bought tickets for a Christmas show at a smaller local theater for ourselves and two other couples. Each pair of tickets was $153. There is another $306 that is owed to us. (This was charged over a month ago because it was apparently from our last billing period.) I’m hoping when we see my brother this weekend, he will have the money for us, from both him and his wife and their friends that we are going with.

Throughout the year, my mom and I are constantly owing each other money. She’ll buy something for me, then I’ll buy something for her and so on and so forth.  Our current total was her owing me $81. She paid me back this weekend.

Due to my bank debacle, I have $100 extra dollars in my bank account. I am going to take the $81 she gave me and put it in my car repair envelope and then send the extra money in my checking account to the credit card.

As soon as we are paid back for those tickets, I will send that money, all $306, straight to the credit card!

I’m also expecting a credit from our Japan trip. I don’t have any idea how much that will be, but whatever the total is per person, I get two times that as both my son and myself went. None of this money will be spent. I will put the entire amount into our savings account/emergency fund to top it off and get it back to $10000. (Also, I’m hoping The Daughter applies to go so any money we have left from our trip I plan to rollover to help pay for her trip.)

We do still owe my best friend money from our Japan trip. She paid for the full amount of the hotel room and some random souvenirs. I need to total that up and pay her back. Once I figure out the amount, I can budget for it in our monthly budget.

Baby steps and spoonfuls at a time. We will get out of debt!

A Small, Exciting To Me, Update!

So this month is September… in our family, we do a No-Spend September, where we only try to spend money on food, gas, and bills. We don’t buy Starbucks. We don’t go out to eat. We don’t buy new clothes or shoes. We don’t get haircuts.

Because of all this, we save any gift cards we do have for September. Usually we can go to a movie or two with gift cards. We can usually have one meal out and I usually have a free drink saved up for Starbucks. We don’t cheat and we don’t spend any of our own money.

This year, I had 3 drinks saved for Starbucks; 2 free ones and a $5 gift card that my sweet friend gave me. I was pretty excited to start September off with 3 drinks! (I have since used one.)

But… this week I attended a baby shower of a friend I’ve known for 20 years. And I won two games! One game was a baby word unscramble and the other game was when you can’t say the word “baby”. The prize for each game was a $10 Starbucks gift card and a nice bar of chocolate!

I was so happy for the Starbucks gift cards. That brought my total number of drinks for the month up to 7! That I wouldn’t be paying for! Now, I never drink 7 Starbucks in a month so I’m not going to start now!

I will take one of the gift cards and add it to my Starbucks totals so that I could have up to 5 drinks this month; but I have plans for the other one…

Let’s just say that card will make my Christmas cost $10 less!

Another Extra Payment

YEAH! I made another credit card payment!

Our minimum payment due this month is $496. Today, I sent $357 towards my credit card. We still have 3 paydays until our next minimum payment is due so $357 is a good start!

This past weekend, we saw family who owed us money. I had a sister and her husband who owed us $50 and a brother and his wife who owed us $307. Both siblings owed us for tickets to different shows we are seeing.

I took the money we were given and deposited in the bank right away so I could make the payment as soon as possible!

I’m so glad we sent all the money right to the credit card!

It wasn’t a huge payment, but an extra $357 over and above the minimum payment each month means we are that much closer to getting out of debt!

Small Extra Payments

As always, we didn’t pay off as much debt as I would have liked.

At this point, I’m actually just speculating because I only know, about, what my credit card balance is going to be. Needless to say, it didn’t go down enough! I do know that the balance will be less than last month’s, so regardless of the total we did make progress.

Near the end of our billing cycle I was able to make some extra payments I wasn’t totally anticipating. And boy am I glad I was because without those extra payments, I wouldn’t have made any progress at all on our debt; we would have just broken even.

I received a small extra paycheck this month, which was awesome because I wasn’t sure when I was going to get that check. I sent that entire check $188 to the credit card and I actually rounded it up to $200.  I also overestimated a couple of our other bills to the tune of $16. I know that isn’t much, but right now, every little bit helps. So I was able to send an extra payment of $216.

My mom also paid me back $81 that she owed me and after my bank debacle, I was able to send another extra $100 towards our credit card.

I’m glad all these small extra payments allowed me to make some small progress towards our credit card debt. I’m only sad that we still charged so much on our credit card over the month. If we had charged less over the month, these small payments would have made a bigger dent. I can’t change the past, but I can continue to work to improve our future. Again, I’m trying to look on the bright side and be glad that we made payments that totaled more than we charged this month; and that these small extra payments are actually the difference of why that happened, without them our debt would have actually risen again.

I need to remember that EVERY little bit helps!

Taking my credit card out of my wallet was one of the smartest decisions I’ve ever made. Although we still made charges on the card over the month, the amount we’ve charged has seriously decreased; hence, the reason we were able to actually make progress towards our credit card at all, albeit just a little bit.

September Debt Update

My last debt update had some real truth in it… some real painful truth! I was sticking my head in the sand when it came to my credit card and my debt and that’s no way to live life! And definitely no way to get out of debt. It’s only been a month, but I have seen some progress; not so much in our debt totals (though those have decreased slightly) but in my attitude towards debt and my rededication to paying cash and not relying on my credit card. I know what I’m about to admit is slightly pathetic, but it’s also honest, taking my credit card out of my wallet was one of the smartest financial decisions I’ve made in a long time! I wish I could say I had enough willpower to not swipe my card, but I just didn’t. I would swipe and then feel guilty afterward. Now I’m making progress.

Okay, on to our debt update!

The debt we owe our children has continued to (ever so slowly) decrease. We borrowed almost $1500 from each child and have paid back $1050 to each of them, which means we are just over two-thirds of the way through paying them back! Although once we have fully paid them back, we will continue to deposit $50 into their bank accounts, I will be so happy when I can no longer consider them a debt! Our car loan has continued to decrease as well. We have a 0% loan so it’s nice to see the payment actually affect the bottom line; to that end, I don’t really focus on paying extra towards our car payment because it’s at 0% interest. I know that goes against what Dave Ramsey teaches, but I can’t see paying more interest on my credit card balance just to get an interest free loan paid off quicker.

Our constant struggle is our credit card. I have only been trying to do a cash only budget for about 6 weeks and The Husband is not on board, but I’m hoping to see some slow progress. Our credit card debt had increased mightily from April to August, but for the first time in several months, the balance went down; not by much, but it is progress. On the plus side the loans to our kids and the car loan are slowly decreasing. For the first time in literally months, our overall debt decreased this month! (I am so happy to get to be writing that instead of having to say again that our debt went up!)

Here are our current debt totals:

            $20523.18          Credit Card at 16.24% interest

            $450                 The Girl

            $450                 The Boy

            $6165.00           Car Loan at 0% interest

Our total debt stands at: $27,588.18. YIKES! I can hardly wrap my head around that number. I absolutely HATE seeing a 2 as the first number on our credit card and that is my first priority… get that number back under $20000. In the grand scheme of things, the actual amount of debt is not that much less but psychologically there is a huge difference!

Plus side: our debt dropped from 28K-something to 27K-something. We paid off over $750 of debt in actual dollars, which amounted to about 2.7% of our total debt.

Down side: we only paid off a little over $300 of credit card debt in actual dollars after stupid tax, er, interest.

Looking forward to: getting our credit card debt below $20000 and working towards my goal of under $18000 by 12/31/18. Bringing our car loan down into the $5K-something range. And bringing our debt from $27K-something to 26K-something.

Obviously all my financial goals for the year have been thrown out the window. There are only 3 months of the year left and I’m nowhere near where I wanted to be. However, I can’t change the past, all I can do is improve my future. Since our credit card debt is nearly $21000, my goal for the end of 2018 is to be under $18000 in credit card debt. My other debts will continue to decrease at their slow and steady pace, but I am going to payoff $3000 in credit card debt by the end of the year. That’s my goal. This is another one of these realistic stretch goals.

We didn’t pay off as much debt as I would have liked in total dollars. No-Spend September should increase our debt payoff numbers for next month, however. I’m hoping to almost double the amount of money we pay off next month.

In order to be successful, some things will have to fall in place for us. My raise and retro pay will have to go into effect as that is how I am planning to pay for Christmas this year, coupled with some Amazon gift cards. November’s three paycheck month extra check will be able to primarily go towards credit card debt. And The Husband will have to fully max out his 401K two weeks into December as we are anticipating so we will get extra money in his paychecks in the end of December.

Obviously, I’m not in an ideal situation. But if I have to get out of debt one baby step at a time, I can do that.

Some things I’m looking forward to: by our next debt update in October, we should be below $20000 in credit card debt and working towards getting it lower! And, through no effort of our own, our car loan will fall below $6000 and be in the $5000’s, (this is purely through our regular payments and not something we had any hand in), however it will still be a good feeling to see that number falling.

Also over the next month I will continue to try to live credit card free, throw any extra money towards our credit card debt and stick to our budget! This all combined with my only real financial goal right now, getting our credit card debt below $18000 by New Year’s Eve!

WOW! This was a long post! If you stayed around until the end, thank you! If you got bored and moved on, I totally understand.

Look out goal #1: below $18000 in credit card debt by 12/31/18… I’m coming for you!

Another No-Spend Update

We had another grocery shopping trip.

We actually didn’t go to any of our regular grocery stores. We went to Target. My mom was here over the weekend and as a treat for No-Spend September, she bought the kids a movie and we had an at-home movie night.

Since we went to Target to buy a movie, we just did our grocery shopping for the week there.

We spent $22.27. We only needed hummus and hamburger buns for our dinner menus, but we also bought some fruit, tortillas, and bagels to round out the week.

We still had $311.97 of our food budget remaining. After subtracting our total from Target, we have $289.70 to last us the rest of the month. As we are nearly 2/3 through the month, I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t be able to do this.

October will be very expensive for groceries and not because we did without for September, but because we try so hard to eat out of our pantry and freezer for September. We will need to buy meat, lunch meat, milk (always!), cheese, bread, and snacks. We should be able to stay in budget in October; we just won’t have much money left over!

Oh well, one month at a time and I feel like September is going pretty well!

Quick No-Spend September Update

A little truth in blogging post... technically, we probably shouldn't have bought this because it is No-Spend September, but it was food and for a good cause so we did it anyway!

This morning I used $25 from our food envelope to purchase a tri-tip dinner for 4 from The Boy’s Ag-Bio class fundraiser.

It will be our dinner one day next week.

We had $336.97 remaining in our food budget for the month. We spent $25 so our remaining total is $311.97.

This weekend we will do grocery shopping for the week. We need some perishables to supplement our dinners for the week. We will need fruits and veggies for the week, some milk, and a few staples. It shouldn’t be too expensive of a shopping trip.

We should still be able to stay within budget for the month.

A Funny Thing Happened at the Bank

Last Friday, I went to the bank like I always do on The Husband’s payday to pull out the money to fill our envelopes. This week I was filling all my envelopes, not just cash and gas so it was a rather hefty sum in multiple denominations: fifties, twenties, tens, and fives.

Well, I went up to the teller, like normal with my withdrawal form and my post-it note. (I always have a post-it note that has a denominations break-down of how I want the money.) After she pulled up my account, she asked me how I wanted my money. I told her X amount of fifties, X amount of twenties, X amount of tens, and X amount of fives. I then asked her if it added up right. She said it did.

She pulled all the money out of her drawer and then started to count it back to me. As she was counting, when she got near the end, she kind of stuttered over the numbers. I noticed but honestly didn’t think much of it.

I took the money, set it in my wallet and headed to my car. It was only when I got to my next destination and had a few minutes to spare that I started to actually fill my envelopes. Needless to say, I ran out of money before I ran out of envelopes.

I counted my money again and again. I double and triple checked my already filled envelopes. I added and counted the totals on my post-it note. I checked the numbers on my spreadsheet. Anyway I cut it, I was $100 short.

I finished the errands I had to run and then called the bank. I was on hold for about 8 minutes and on my way home when I decided to go to the bank to get this figured out. By the time I got to the bank, I’d been on hold about 13 minutes. I stayed in line at the bank for another 7 minutes, still on hold, before I was helped by the teller. It was a different teller than had helped me earlier. The first thing I told her was that I had been on hold for 20 minutes and no one had ever helped me or even asked me to continue holding. (To me, it was apparent that they just figured someone would wait and give up!) All she said to me was, “It’s Friday and we’re really busy”.

I proceeded to explain to her that I had a very unique situation. I told her I had come to the bank earlier and that I had taken out some money and that I thought I was shorted $100. I told her who helped me and about what time I had come in. (The lady that helped me originally was still there, but not at her counter and was helping another customer.) The feeling that I got from the new teller helping me was that while she believed I was short $100, she was pretty sure I made a mistake somewhere. She was nice to me, but she just gave off a vibe of “we don’t make mistakes like that, you must have miscounted”. Nevertheless, she took my name, account number, and telephone number and told me that my original teller would contact me later that evening once she’d balanced her drawer, “if she was off”.

I left discouraged, but I also felt like I had done everything I could do.

Fast forward just a short while later and my cell phone rings. It was my original teller calling me to apologize and tell me that, yes, she had shorted me $100.

I was so happy and felt such a flood of relief. What I’m the most happy about is the fact that it was resolved so quickly. I really appreciate that she called me and told me so fast! She told me, “sorry, and we have your money here for you”. At this point, I had been to the bank twice already (and on hold with them for 20 minutes) and didn’t fancy a third trip so I asked her to just deposit it back into my account. Which she promptly did.

I was able to “borrow” $100 from our car repair envelope until I am able to get to the bank and replace the money. All my envelopes have the correct amount of money in them and so does my bank account… now.

In the grand scheme, it was “only” $100, but in my current reality, it was $100!!! I’m working really hard to dig out of debt so I wasn’t really looking forward to losing $100 to my bank. I’m so glad it was resolved so quickly and I don’t have to worry about not being believed, (which was probably my biggest worry!).

That’s a long story for “just” $100!

A Small Extra Paycheck

I am teaching a new class this year.

 It’s not only a new-to-me class but also a new-to-our school class.

It’s a ton of work!!! I am having to create all the curriculum. (I’m not gonna lie; the internet is a life saver here!) I’ve found lots of lessons that can work, which has made my life easier. As my old mentor used to say “you don’t have to reinvent the wheel”. I have found so many lessons that I have been able to adapt and use in my classroom!

So, why am I telling you this? What does it have to do with me being a brunette getting out of debt?

At the end of the school year last year, I asked my principal to pay me for some planning time. I actually sent her an email the week after school got out and didn’t check my email again until we came back to school 8 weeks later.

And she said yes!

I tried to phrase it in a way that would be difficult to tell me no. I asked her “how many hours of planning time would she be willing to pay me for?”… Not if she would be willing or not. Her response was “we don’t usually pay for planning time, but because you are creating a whole new curriculum, I will pay for a day’s worth of planning.”

I was so excited! And it was so unexpected! But I figured if I didn’t ask, I wouldn’t get.

I submitted a time sheet with 7.5 hours to my secretary and (hopefully) I will get reimbursed on the 10^th of next month. It could be the 10^th of October if my time sheet wasn’t turned in on time. But, either way, the extra money is going towards my debt!

After all is said and done, it will only be about $175 extra, but I’ll take it. That’s $175 more than it could have been for the same amount of work! I was going to do planning over the summer either way, but now I’m getting a little bit of money for my efforts.

According to my credit card statement, in order to get out of debt in 3 years, I would need to pay $738 per month and not make any more charges. My average monthly payments are right about $730 so I am on track on that side, but we do continue to charge so I would actually need to pay more. This extra $175 is a little more.

Every little bit helps and I will send the entire extra small paycheck towards debt!

No Spend Update

I blog more and have more updates in September than in any month of the year!

I try really hard to stay on top of my grocery budget and any spending I may do during the month! And in an effort to stay accountable, I blog about it… constantly!

After church on Sunday this week, The Boy and I went grocery shopping for the week at Wico. The only thing actually on our menu list for this week was bell peppers and we had a small list of staples that we needed: cooking spray, fruit for the week, and chicken salad/cracker packages.  This turned into a $72+ trip.

First of all, taking The Boy had me putting some stuff in my basket that I wouldn’t have otherwise. Hello Nutella and applesauce packets. (To be fair, I offered the Nutella so The Kids could make “banana-rollups for breakfast and I’ve been wanting to know if The Boy would take the applesauce packets to school or if he would be “too cool” for them. Turns out he said he would take them.)

We got fruit for the week: cuties, bananas, nectarines, strawberries, and mangos. The only vegetables we had to buy this week was bell peppers; we also bought 24 chicken and tuna salad/cracker packages, 2 boxes of applesauce packets, 3 jars of salsa, 2 bottles of cooking spray, 3 bags of tortilla chips, Nutella, and one loaf of bread. That is everything we bought. The total came to $72.63.

We spent $30 on chicken and tuna salad and another $11 on applesauce. When I was lamenting to The Husband about how cheap the trip would have been without those things, he pointed out to me that prepared foods are expensive. It’s nice to have some quick grab-and-go items at home for those days that are busy or we wake up late, so these things are worth the money. Essentially we got 24 lunches for $40 which breaks down to $1.66 per lunch. We would not be able to buy lunch that cheaply, so again, in my opinion worth the money and convenience.

Let’s total it all up, shall we? Before this shopping trip we had $409.60 left in our grocery budget for September from a total of $500. After spending almost $73, we still have $336.97. We are 1/3 of the way through the month and almost exactly 1/3 of the way through our budget. We are right on track.

As with every year, I’m optimistic that we will be able to stay in budget, but one never knows what expenses might pop up, or what food staples we might run out of…

But so far, so good!

Celebrating Small Wins

I want to take a moment to celebrate some of my small wins in the last few weeks. Our society is so much about “go big or go home”, that we forget even minor wins are just that… wins.

This month our “school” envelope ran out of money before the month ended. I was not diligent about funding the envelope and then school started and it was expensive! The problem was I still had to pay for The Girl’s school pictures. I went to our house petty cash jar and was able to roll almost enough money in coins to pay for it and just had to take a few dollar bills from the jar to cover the difference. I rolled $39 ($30 in quarters, $5 in dimes, $2 in nickels, and $2 in pennies). Then I grabbed $8 more dollars and I had enough money to cover the school pictures. Her package was $43, after tax the total was $46 and change. (I did charge the pictures as you have to order online, but I am going to the bank today to deposit the money and sending it to the credit card ASAP!) I’m super excited that we were able to cover that expense with money that really didn’t have any other purpose and was just lying around. I know it wasn’t much, but it kept us from adding to our debt! Winning!

As with most families, our grocery/food budget is one of our biggest expenses! For months we have been exceeding our budget! I’m very happy to say that for the month of August, we stayed within our grocery budget and even had a little bit of money left over! The leftover money does have a purpose as our budgeting period runs every 2 weeks. It will go to buy the first round of our September groceries. (When we planned our meals for September we really tried to shop our freezer and our pantry and we did a really good job. We actually don’t have too much to buy! Another small win!)

In the past, any leftover money would be put towards debt, but many weeks/months we were coming up short in our grocery budget. Going forward, I am going to keep leftover money in the envelope and hope that it helps combat any months where there is a shortfall. December, for example, is always an expensive month for food; we host a Christmas party and the food gets expensive. 

Hopefully carrying money over will help us to stay on budget during those more expensive months.

Last week I visited a local boutique in town and found some things that would make great gifts for a couple people. I got things for The Girl and a friend’s daughter, and picked up a couple stocking stuffers that my mom is going to give to people; (she is going to pay me back). The total was just over $50, of which my mom will pay me back $20. In the past, I just would have mindlessly whipped out my credit card and gone further into debt to make the purchase. This time, I made a different choice. (Actually, I couldn’t have used my credit card because I stopped carrying it in my wallet over 4 weeks ago! J) I wasn’t going to go further into debt to buy this stuff so I used my debit card from a different account. Granted, I can’t do this all the time because most of that money is actually earmarked somewhere, but for a one time deal, at only about $50, I was able to make that work.

None of these things were huge wins, but when put together, they add up to something pretty awesome… progress, growth, new patterns! I’m hoping to have even more small wins in the future; and I’m hoping to keep track of them! Small wins over time equal big successes!

Super Quick No-Spend September Update

Hi again. Back with a super quick No-Spend September update.

After our big trip to Winco, we still had to go to Costco to get milk. I was able to get there the next day and I bought 10 gallons of milk (yes, 10!) and spent a total of $18.95. We are all big milk drinkers in my family and always have been. However with a teenaged boy in the house, we have been going through faster than ever.

We used to buy 6 gallons at a time but then we got a fridge in our garage and we started buying 8 at a time. Recently, we started buying 10 gallons at a time as our son will often drink half a gallon of milk with dinner… literally

Our Costco membership pays for itself with our savings on milk alone!

We still had $428.55 in our food budget for the month so after that purchase, we still have $409.60.

So far, so good!

No Spend September

Well, it’s that time again… No-Spend September. It’s a time when we reset our finances, pay close attention to where our money actually goes, and try to only buy necessities: food and gas.

I have a love/hate relationship with No-Spend September. I love the amount of money we save or are able to put towards debt, but I hate how it reminds me how mindlessly I usually spend.

Each year we determine a set amount of money we want to spend on groceries, usually $100 less than what we normally spend. As we recently upped our monthly grocery budget because we were continually going over it, the amount we want to stay under for No-Spend September this year is $500.

We will also continue to pay all of our bills and any necessary expenses that pop up during the month. The idea is not to stop living our life or to fall further into debt by making poor choices, but to reexamine how and where we are spending our money; making sure that we are sending any “saved” money during the month towards debt.

We had to make an exception already this month and that kind of drives me bonkers!

We took The Boy to get his haircut on Labor Day… in September. We had originally planned to take him last week but between school, football, and homework, there literally weren’t enough hours in the day. He went to school and from there went straight to football. He got home from football at 6:00, ate dinner, did homework for 2 to 2.5 hours, then took a shower and went to bed at 9:00. No matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t squeeze in a haircut for him before September 1^st so we made an exception and took him in on our extra day off. I was annoyed but it couldn’t be helped.

I (try to) plan our dinner meals out for the month. It makes our life easier and more organized. I did sit down and plan for September, so over Labor Day weekend we went grocery shopping for all our non-perishable needs for the next month. During September, we really try to use up foods/meals we already have; another way to help keep our grocery budget down in September. We have several frozen meals in our freezer and several pantry meals we are going to eat this month so our initial grocery shopping trip wasn’t too bad.

Our first trip was to Winco where we spent $63.46. We bought fruits and vegetables for the week, several packets of dried mashed potatoes, pasta, some dairy items, and a few odds and ends for the rest of the month. We also stopped by Safeway (because apparently I’m a string cheese snob and only like one brand) and bought string cheese for $7.99. We still need to make it to Costco to buy milk (10 gallons) and tortilla chips.

Of our $500 grocery budget, we spent $71.45 and still have $428.55 to last us the rest of the month. As always, I think it should be doable, but who knows? I always think it will be doable and then I’m always very carefully counting my pennies at the end of the month praying to make it under budget!

August Unusual Spending Recap

How did I do on guestimating my unusual spending for August you ask? Not too shabby.

Things I need to plan for in August are: back-to-school haircuts, school pictures, ring repairs, and a soccer tournament for me. (This came directly from my Unusual Spending post.)

We did pretty well estimating what we were going to need, but only “okay” at funding everything.

Haircuts and (forgotten) back-to-school manis/pedis were paid for in cash out of our “hair” envelope. Going forward, it will be a hair and nails envelope. Every year The Kids and I go get manicures and pedicures right before school starts. We’ve done it every year since they started Kindergarten (with the exception of one where I was injured) and I would love to carry on the tradition as long as they will allow me too! Don’t tell any of his friends, but even The Boy goes. I look forward to the time with my kids every year and I have never paid cash for it before. Going forward, I would like for that to change; and as I said, adding $25 extra per month to the “hair” envelope is an easy way to do that.

School pictures have been a bit tricky… The Boy took his pictures at orientation, but we haven’t been sent home anything to buy them yet. The Girl’s will be on the last day of August and we currently have $0 in our “school” envelope. I might be able to roll coins from our “house petty cash” to cover school pictures.

I currently have $650 sitting in the bank waiting to pay for the repair on my rings. The total repair will be closer to $900. The remainder will come from our “annual expenses” account. I originally had more money but we had a couple of small unexpected expenses that I paid for using our debit card. The con: I don’t have enough money to pay for the whole repair in my checking account. The pro: I paid those extra expenses using my debit card!

One thing I forgot to budget for was my soccer fees. They went up this year to $75 from $65. I play a fall and spring season and for some reason, I always forget to budget for it. I have $45 in cash that wasn’t intended for anything. I think I will pay for the remaining $30 out of the “kids’ activities” envelope. It’s not technically a kids’ activity, but it does fall under the same category.

Overall I’ve done worse, but I’ve also done better.

Next month should be pretty low-key and well in budget as it is our annual “No-Spend September”.

I am putting half our usual amounts to fund envelopes so that there is some money in there for when October hits, but the majority of any extra money next month will go to paying off debt.

As always, wish us luck.

The Disneyland Trip That Wasn't

We had an opportunity to go to Disneyland… in No-Spend September over Labor Day weekend… when we are supposed to be focusing on paying off debt, and we were going to take it.

My sister and her family have annual passes to Disneyland. Their passes had a promotion that would have allowed us to purchase 1 day passes for $109 instead of the regular price of $185 each. Gas would have been covered by our gas envelope, just barely, and we planned to do food super cheap. We were going to bring breakfasts, lunches, and snacks with us and only eat dinners out.

Even so, we figured it would still be nearly a $1000 weekend.

Then, we asked my mom to give The Husband and The Kids their Disneyland tickets for Christmas. That would have saved us $330.

We figured gas at $150. Hotel at $300 ($125 per night/2 nights, plus taxes and fees). My ticket at $109. Lastly we estimated 2 dinner meals out at $100 ($50 per dinner).

Even working the trip as frugally as we could we were looking at $650.

And we were going to do it.

We haven’t been to Disneyland in 5 years and an opportunity to go, at a discounted price, fell into our lap and we were ready to jump on it!

I know that wasn’t the smartest financial decision but that goes back to where getting out of debt meets life.  This was life. We really struggled with the decision of whether or not to go but finally decided the opportunity was too good to pass up. After a few days and several conversations we committed.

But then again, life had other plans.

The same day we finally committed, The Boy came home from football practice and told us he had practice on Labor Day. He didn’t know what time, but the coaches said it would be earlier than normal. First of all, we (wrongly) assumed there wouldn’t be practice on the Monday of Labor Day weekend. Secondly, we figured even if there was, we could be home in time for a 3:30 practice. We would just leave Southern California early in the morning. But, no. There is football practice. At 8:00 in the morning.

Clearly these football coaches have no life! J This is how the post came to be titled “The Disneyland Trip That Wasn’t”.

The upshot is, we are staying home and saving money and not taking a trip during No-Spend September. The downside is we aren’t going to Disneyland. L

This will enable us to pay off more debt than if we went because we either had to funnel money from debt repayment to our trip or we would have had to transfer money over from savings to pay for the trip.  It also keeps us in-line with our goals for No-Spend September.

Of course I wanted to go to Disneyland, but I’m trying to see the silver lining. In the long run, this will be better for us and when we are debt free (someday) we’ll be able to take a multi-day trip to Disneyland and not have to worry about the money.

Happy Labor Day!