January 2012 Budget Report

I haven't done a monthly budget report since April 2011. Wow. I hadn't realized it had been that long! For those interested, here is how we ended January:



We ended with $593.10 extra! That was all thanks to increased income, some really big snowflakes and staying under budget in almost every category! It was my goal to have at least $500 extra in our budget this month since we were over by about that much in our December budget. And we did! I looked at our December budget and that number was actually $514.17. So I left that much in our checking to act as a buffer (need to ensure cash flow is available to pay off our credit cards in full each month!) and transferred the remaining $78.93 to our emergency fund. It feels really good to be able to add little bits to that whenever I can! Now to keep up this momentum and make February great too...

Window Repaired, but...

Last Friday we had our windshield replaced on our car. And we paid exactly the quoted, fair price. All good, right? Well...they broke our rearview mirror during the replacement. Murphy is chuckling over there in the corner right now. The mirror itself didn't break but the bracket holding the mirror to the windshield did. When something, like the mirror, is stuck and not budging, the window replacement guy is supposed to contact the car owner before they try to yank it off. The guy didn't do that even though he was replacing the glass at our house and C was right inside. Instead he tried to pry/pull/yank it off and ended up breaking it. C told him we'd try to find an inexpensive replacement at a salvage yard but if we couldn't that we'd be contacting them to fix it for us. C had them right "broke rearview mirror" on the receipt they gave us. I drove the car on Sunday when I was out shopping and it is so annoying to not have that mirror! I asked C if he'd duct tape it to the windshield for now until we get it fixed. It may not look nice but it will be functional at least!

I'm going to be working on the budget tonight and tomorrow so stay tuned for our budget report, month end report, goals review, etc in the next couple days!

I posted 18 times in January. That is the most of any month since February 2008! Are you sick of me yet? Ha!

Hello Murphy

Thanks for not skewering us for that whole furniture thing. I'm not too worried about the added debt for several reasons like it's at 0%, we have money in the bank to pay it off entirely if we wanted or needed to and I'm very disciplined with our budget and am 100% confident we'll pay it off before the outrageous interest kicks in.

Anyway, today I am here to talk about Murphy. We haven't seen him around in a while (knock on wood!) but he showed up last weekend. Last year I dropped our insurance coverage on our older car (a 2001 Mitsubishi Eclipse with 170,000+ miles on it) down to liability only to save money on insurance. The car itself is only worth about $1750 so it made sense to drop the comprehensive and collision coverage. When I did that though we also lost our glass coverage. See where this is going? Saturday morning on my way home from a quick Target run (totally within budget - I swear!) I'm driving along when a sudden loud noise startles me. I look at my windshield and sure enough, it has cracked from the bottom right side almost all the way across to the left side. I didn't notice a chip down where the crack originated and I was alone on the road so there was not a rock from a passing vehicle or anything like that. It was totally unexpected. I called our insurance agent Monday morning and verified that we don't have glass coverage. Nope, we don't.

Today C called around to a few companies and found a pretty good estimate for us. The windshield is going to be replaced on Friday for $232. I think that's a pretty good deal and I'll be thankful to once again have a safe car to drive. We're hoping this car lasts us another 2+ years. C will graduate from school in May 2014 with his nursing license and we'd like to wait until then to replace the car. (Cross your fingers he gets in to the 2 year program starting this fall! His application is in but we may not hear until May 1st if he's been admitted or not!)

We have almost $800 left in our budget for this month thanks to some extra income from C and reduced spending in our discretionary categories for this month. We have gas in our vehicles and food in our pantry. We shouldn't need anything more for this month. We should be able to pay this bill and still keep around $500 in our checking account as our buffer. And that's after transferring the extra $400 to the emergency fund and $400 to the short term savings house fund. C and I will have to sacrifice the $100 each "fun money" that I was going to take out but that's OK. It feels good to have the cash on hand to repair the windshield.

Now please stay away Murphy. We need to have a few good months (years!) in front of us to rebuild some savings!

We Have Gone Crazy

So, we may have lost our minds, just a little. It's time to confess. We opened a store branded credit card on Sunday and used it to purchase $1935 in living room furniture. We purchased two couches and a chair with that money. We have had a living room set picked out since last November and went to "visit" it on Saturday night with my mom and sister. Turns out they were having a 30% off sale plus 0% financing for a year. So we brought home the swatches of our chosen fabric Saturday night and mulled it over. And then Sunday we went shopping and bought a couple matching throw pillows at Target since we had the fabric swatches and then we went back to the store and ordered the furniture. I don't regret at all ordering this new furniture. Our current couch is old and you practically sink to the floor when you sit on it. That plus the fact that we don't even have enough seating in our living room for our family (couch plus chair = 4 spaces and we have 5 people in our family) but whenever we have guests over we end up pulling chairs from the breakfast table into the living room. And we have guests over regularly with family and friends routinely stopping by. I'm very glad to have new furniture.

I'm not very glad we went into debt to do it. But it is at 0% and we will be making monthly payments to pay it off before any interest is accrued. The financing starts 30 days after we take delivery of the furniture which will be 3-4 weeks from now so starting in March I'll have a budget line item of about $175 each month going to the furniture purchase. I'll add this debt to my sidebar later this week when I update all the numbers for the end of the month. Don't pile on too bad, OK? I know what we did goes against all the PF rules. We chose to do it anyway and will pay it off. I promise!

Hello Expected Check of Unexpected Size!

Thanks for all your feedback on date nights! I think we'll start asking our family members a little more often to come watch the kids (Since they ask to babysit our kids for us I guess they don't mind it too much!) so we can get out once or twice a month for date nights. And the rest of the month we'll make more time for each other at home rather than me being on the computer upstairs while he's on the iPad on the couch downstairs (like we are right now!). (BTW - did I tell you guys that we won an iPad2 last fall? I can't remember if I did or not but we did and we love it, the end. Heh.)

Anyway, back to the post title...yesterday in the mail we received our escrow refund check. I knew this would be coming but wasn't sure how much it would be. I probably could have had an educated guess if I had looked at our last statement to see what our escrow balance was when we sold the old house but well, I guess I didn't think of that. Anyway, we received the check yesterday, like I said, and I was really surprised at the amount! It was $1003! Wow! We deposited it right away yesterday but aren't completely sure what we're going to do with it. If you'll remember our last unexpected check we decided at the end to spend some and leave the rest in our checking account to replenish our buffer. I offered up one idea: to split it. I asked C if maybe we should put $400 in our emergency fund, $400 in our house savings fund, $100 to him and $100 to me to spend on anything we want. C has wanted to get some new jeans to replace some old ones of his. I'd like a new winter coat (which should be on clearance about now!) and maybe some new jeans as well. We'd spend this $200 on ourselves to purchase some (near) necessities and then give our monthly budget a little breathing room. And the rest would go to savings. We haven't decided 100% on this plan but I'm confident a large portion of it will be transferred soon to our savings. Yay for big checks!

Budgeting for Date Night

There have been a couple divorce and separation announcements this week from some prominent bloggers. I was shocked by both of them and, I'll admit, emotional about them too. I don't "know" these people, only read the words they've shared, and yet I had a physical reaction to their news. I come from a divorced family. My parents divorced my junior year of high school after almost twenty years of marriage. Their divorce had a profound effect on me and I'll admit that divorce is scary to me. Now, my marriage is pretty good. But like any marriage, we have to make time for each other if we're going to keep this good thing going. We've been terrible the past several years in having date nights. We have lots of free babysitting available to us via family members and yet we still don't make the time. I think it's because our budget is usually so tight that it's just easier for us to spend time together after the kids are in bed rather than leaving the house and paying for a dinner or movie out. And we definitely don't leave any room in the budget for date nights either. So, I'm looking for ideas. What do you do for date nights? Do you have any frugal ideas for us? Or should we slow down our savings a bit to budget in a bit more time to do things?

Medical Bill?

Earlier this week we received a bill from our pediatrician for $129.00. The last time we were to the doctor with the kids was just before Christmas when A had a sore throat. Not wanting to go into Christmas with a possibly contagious child, we went in for a strep test (which was negative, thank goodness). We paid our $25 co-pay and I figured that'd be about the last we heard of that. And then a bill shows up. Before panicking (hey, I'm learning!) I calmly put the envelope in my purse and made a mental note to call the office the next day.

I did call the office the next day and talked with a billing specialist. It turns out for some unknown reason, our insurance company added an extra digit onto our member number after the bill was submitted to them and so they denied the claim because there was no such person in their system. Well, of course there wasn't when they had the number wrong! The billing specialist was going to re-submit and expected that it would go through without issue the second time. I'll keep an eye out for a second billing just in case. And at least I didn't stress too much about this one. I figured there was a mix up somewhere!