Unusual Spending for March

I know this post is a little late, but better late than never.  I still like to see our unusual spending in black and white, it makes it much easier to plan for.

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.

We have a lot going on this month!

The Husband turns 40 this month! I can’t believe it! I want to get him a nice gift, actually two nice gifts. One that he asked for and one that I picked out that I know he will love! I had my brother-in-law help with the gift my husband requested as it is a woodworking tool and I know absolutely nothing about those! The other one is a total secret (and probably won’t be able to get gotten until the summer time… did you follow that?).

Along with his actual birthday, we are hosting family birthday parties at my house. I’m going to go easy for food and get lasagna, salad, and French bread… all pre-made and from Costco. It’s more expensive to buy pre-made, but the convenience is worth it. I’m hoping to pay for most of this out of my grocery budget for March. I planned most of my March meals using food we already had so I don’t need to buy too much this month so I’m hoping to skate by on the budget side of things here.

At the end of this month, we are hosting a foreign exchange student from Japan for just under a week. She has already said she’s excited to try lobster and beef…eek! Holy expensive tastes Batman! We also plan to take her to Simply Fondue for dinner one night and would like to take her to Mexican food as that isn’t really a “thing” in Japan. We also want to take her to a zoo or aquarium while she is here. As part of having a foreign exchange student, we are hosting a potluck for everyone involved at our house. We of course only need to supply one dish, but we will also need plates, cups, napkins, serving utensils, etc. (And our house needs to be super cleaned… but I guess that’s another story for another day.)

We actually have two car registrations due in the month of March. The Husband’s daily driver and mine. We paid The Husband’s out of our annual expenses budget and will be covering mine using the cushion in our checking account. Somehow over the last few months, we have gained a $300+ cushion in our checking account. In one sense, I think that’s awesome, but in another, that money is not working for us; and as we are in debt, we need our money to be working for us. I only discovered the extent of the cushion recently when I was reconciling my bank balance.

March definitely has some expensive things going on, and we haven’t really planned out how to budget for them. But being aware of them is half the battle.

Going forward, I hope to write my unusual spending posts and then create the budget to match; in that way, we will account for all unexpected/unusual spending in our budget.

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!

Drastic Times Call for Drastic Measures

Due to unforeseen circumstances, our credit card bill did not, in fact, go down, but it actually went up. You’ve already read about my car saga, and if you haven’t, you can do so here.

That, coupled with some charges The Husband made, that I was unaware of, caused our bill to sky rocket to just over $18000 by the last closing date.

I am done not being able to make any headway on our credit card bill. I am done with the balance increasing every month. I am just done!

So, my solution is to take $3000 out of savings and plunk it straight on the balance on our credit card; sort of as a way to kickstart our debt repayment.

It's not ideal, but I need to seem some progress. I have got to see a decreased balance on my credit card and I'm hopint this will be the beginning of a downward trend!

I don’t know if it’s the best solution, but right now, it’s the only solution I’ve got.

I am so sick of increased balances on our credit card!

Las Vegas on the Cheap

I know, I know. The title of this post is already a misnomer. How can Las Vegas ever be cheap?

Read on, dear ones.

We traveled to Vegas over the long President’s Day weekend for The Daughter’s dance competition. It was the first comp of the season and in an effort to save money, we brought all our breakfasts, lunches, and snacks with us. We only bought dinner each night, which became a huge cost savings on food!

The day before we left, The Husband and I went grocery shopping at Winco. We had a vague idea of some things we wanted, but mostly we just wandered around the store and grabbed whatever we wanted.

We knew we needed things to eat for breakfast, things for lunch, fruit and snacks. With that in mind, we decided on apples and peanut butter and pop-tarts for breakfast. We bought pre-packaged individual peanut butters, (which we would never usually do) for convenience. They were great, and made clean-up so easy. We grabbed the biggest box of pop-tarts they had and our breakfasts were taken care of.

Again, trying to make life easy, we picked up Lunchabels and pre-made chicken and tuna salad and crackers. We got 10 of each; enough to have each lunch twice. We also bought bananas and cuties to have for fruit with our lunch. From home we brought Baby-bel cheeses and, voila, our lunches were set too!

We bought several different snacks for the trip: Chex Mix, honey roasted peanuts, pretzels, apple sauce, protein biscuits, and Cheeze-its. And, although I thought we were going to run out, there were enough snacks to last the whole trip and we brought some home.

All told, we spent $104 on food at Winco and, bonus, we got to bring the left overs home! $100 wouldn’t have covered even one day’s worth of food if we had bought every meal. Instead, we planned ahead, fed our family of 5 (my mom traveled with us), and saved a ton of money. 

In addition to bringing our food on the trip, The Husband also packed our individual Keurig machine so we would have tea and coffee without having to buy it at Starbucks. That was another huge savings.

While many families flew, we knew it would be much cheaper to drive, not to mention, because of my mom’s hip replacement, she can’t fly yet. I did not think to budget extra money into my gas envelope this month, which would have been the smart thing to do, but we were able to cover most of the gas. My mom did pay for one fill-up and we did have to charge one, but only one, fill-up. The rest were all covered with our gas envelope. Not too shabby.

For cheap… read, free, entertainment, The Husband got on the waiting list at our local library to borrow book one of the Harry Potter series on digital download. We listened to half of it on the way to Vegas and the other half on the way home. That kept The Kids from asking to download and buy a new movie for the ipad, which was awesome.

We also knew the hotel we were staying at had a Regal cinema. We have, literally, hundreds of dollars worth of gift cards to Regal, so we decided to bring them along. On Sunday, we did go as a family to see a movie and we were able to use our gift cards for the tickets. My mom treated for concessions. It was another frugal bit of entertainment for us.

For most of the weekend, The Daughter’s dance competition kept us busy. When we go to Vegas, we usually only gamble with $20 each and once it’s gone, it’s gone. This time was a little different. As a gift, my dad called us while we were driving and told us he would give us each $100 to gamble with! In all honesty, I told The Husband it was painful for me to spend that much money, but it wasn’t ours and we had fun. The Husband had a lot of luck on an “Uncle Sam” inspired slot machine and we played for a couple hours on my dad’s money. All told, we made about $80 and it wasn’t our money that we were gambling with to begin with! That money paid for dinner out on Sunday night with The Girl’s dance team. (So, if you are keeping track, we really only had to buy dinner Friday and Saturday Night as we were home in time for dinner on Monday night and my mom bought us pizza!)

All in all, it was a great trip; and pretty frugal, too. In the 23 years I’ve known my husband, and the15+ times we’ve gone to Vegas, this was definitely the least we’ve ever spent and it couldn’t have come at a better time!!!

When it Rains... It Really Pours

We have three working cars (and one project car).

One of our cars is 15 years old, but still runs pretty well, and more importantly is, paid off. We have not done any work on this cars since 2011 (what?!?) and so we brought it in to have several small, and a couple big, problems taken care of. The total came to $1900. Of that, we had $1700 in our car repair fund, so we only had to come up with an extra $200 to pay the bill.

Since then, it’s started pouring.

That was our “extra” car, and has been for about 3 years, ever since my husband got a new car.

Because we have really liked the flexibility that having an extra car has given us, we felt it was worth the money. In retrospect, I wish we would have waited.

Read on.

Last weekend, in preparation for our upcoming trip to Las Vegas for The Daughter’s dance competition, The Husband went to replace the brake pads on my daily driver car, where he discovered that in addition to the new brake pads, my car needed new rotors and new struts (whatever those are).

He called around and the lowest quote he found for having the work done was $1000.

He decided to do the work himself. We were able to order the parts for about $375 and then we had to pay $180 to have it aligned afterward because the new struts pulled it so far out of alignment. That still worked out to a savings of $450.

Then we had even more rain.

The alignment shop let him know that our power steering fluid is leaking and that the repair will be $1500.

As our car repair is literally tapped out right now, we decided to forgo that repair for now and instead stocked up on power steering fluid so we can fill the reservoir as needed.

I’m bummed, but The Husband is really bummed about it.

It’s really messing with our (meager as it is) debt repayment!

Currently, we have $0 in our car repair fund. We will continue to fund it at $100 a month and any left over gas money each budgeting period will go towards car repair too. Hopefully before too long we can get some money in there so we will have a little cushion.

It’s very disheartening to go from $1700 to negative thousands of dollars in just a short couple weeks. I understand The Husband’s “depression”. I guess for me the hardest part is that we elected to have the work done on our old car when if we had just waited awhile, we would have had enough money to pay for the needed repairs on my car.

Having said that, the reality is that I’m glad we have 3 functional, relatively reliable, cars between the two of us. Hopefully we will be done with car repairs for a little while and we can build our envelope back up!

*Since writing this, we have driven my car to and from Vegas without any issues, so that makes me happy. I was afraid we would have some problems on the road that would cost even more!

Tax Cuts

The new tax cuts enacted by Congress are already having an impact on our finances. For each of my paychecks, we will get an extra $100 per month and for each of The Husband’s we are going to get about $50 more. Over the course of the year, we are going to be able to keep $2400 more of our money! Unfortunately, we won’t be able to have fun with that money, but we will be able to use it to our advantage!

In our budget, I have already adjusted the payments we will be making to our credit card to reflect this extra. This extra each month should help us to meet our goal of being under $10000 of credit card debt by the end of the year. It will certainly help us to meet our goal of paying a minimum of $605. What this extra money will not help us with is to stop charging on our credit cards. That one is all on me!

People can say what they want about Trump and about the tax cuts, but these cuts are making a big difference in my daily life. I am able to keep more of my money in my pocket. The tax cuts are directly affecting me in my daily life. I appreciate them. I will be completely honest, I don’t understand them. Tax codes are way above my pay grade, but I do understand the deposits being made into my account. I do understand that because of the tax cuts, my paychecks are bigger.

Going forward, I plan to send all the extra monies towards debt. Hopefully it works out well for us.

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!