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.