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Jun 9, 2008    |       16 comments

May’s Spending Report

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Without further ado, here’s how things panned out for May (please see this post for a FAQ).

Income for May was awesome. Our economic stimulus payment is in there and it gave us a welcome boost in income. Unfortunately, we didn’t use it like the government wanted us to use it. It went towards our debt 🙂

For clothing in May, I went on a little shopping spree. I hit Walmart (by myself) and bought some new T-shirts for summer. I don’t have many T-shirts and the ones I did have were pretty old. It was time to retire them. I scoured the clearance racks and found five shirts at $3/each. I also picked up a new pair of shoes for our son for less than $10 on clearance.

Entertainment was high in May. We splurged again and purchased another video game. We are done with purchasing new video games for quite a while.

Food is way too high! Gosh it all adds up. We did have to replenish some things once our fridge was back up and running. But the spending is still too high here. Now that we have to purchase healthier foods, it will be interesting to see how our spending is affected. The more I think about it, buying healthier foods may not be as expensive as I once thought. It all depends on how you do it. More on that later, as I figure it out 😉

Household spending for May was quite a bit less than April’s spending. Here’s how it breaks down:

We spent some money to get our garden ready for the summer. It’s time to start planting and I’m debating on whether we should get some plants that are already started or plant directly from seed. It’s tough where we live because we do have a short growing season. My dream is to have an indoor greenhouse in our future house.

Recreation included our spending for fishing this year. I don’t anticipate any more spending for fishing this season unless we keep losing bobbers at record speed. During our last fishing trip, we lost three of them. Thank goodness bobbers are fairly inexpensive (around $2 for a package of them).

May’s gas bill almost made me faint. Ok, maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit. But it did surprise me. I knew we had a cold spring, but I didn’t think it was that bad. Thank goodness the weather has warmed up for June.

Overall, May wasn’t too bad. Like April, there is room for improvement. We have been somewhat consistent, though. If you look at April, our total expenses were $1,900. For May, they were $2,301. The big difference was our health insurance paid in May ($400).

We’ll see how June pans out. So far, our spending has been fairly low (not including the health spending due to problems with our health insurance). Income has been lower too. I feel like we should be contributing to our savings account but we haven’t been able to yet. Hopefully we can soon. After this past weekend, I could use a little “boost.”

Jun 8, 2008    |       18 comments

An Interesting Weekend

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I haven’t felt much like blogging the last few days. A series of events left me a bit bummed and with some extra work on my hands.

First up, my husband is sick again. He called me from the doctors office, “They are saying our insurance is cancelled so I had to pay for the full cost of the visit.”

Crap. It shouldn’t be cancelled. We paid it! I called Blue Cross and they said that they didn’t receive payment. I paid this bill via online bill pay, so I called my bank to see if it cleared. According to them, it didn’t clear but it should have been received by Blue Cross.

A claim has been filed and it is put on the top of the list since it is for our health insurance. I have no idea how everything is going to pan out. I’m only a few months into using online bill pay and now I guess I get to really test out the system. I sure hope things are resolved soon before more medical bills come in. The money we already paid has depleted the little buffer I had in our checking account.

Secondly, like many bloggers out there, my blog was hacked. It wasn’t a huge hack (it redirected search traffic) and everything is still here. That’s a good thing. But I feel pretty violated over the whole thing. I spent hours trying to fix everything and in the back of my mind I couldn’t help but wonder why. Why do people feel the need to do things like that? It makes me very sad.

Lastly, my husband needs to change his diet for health reasons. Overall, that is a good thing because all of us will be eating healthier. But after shopping today, it is clear that our new diet is going to increase our grocery costs. We have to say bye-bye to the cheap processed foods that we buy. We should have done that a long time ago, though.

Nothing really major. They are all things that can be fixed or we can work through them. I didn’t get our May spending report finished, so expect to see that tomorrow night.

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