After a month and a half of not looking at our finances, I finally did it this past weekend.
With the visit of my sister and then my husband’s surgery the first thing to fall of my regular to-do list was overseeing our finances. Why is it that when everything is going OK money is always in my mind, but when things get busy this is the first thing to fall off the radar? I don’t know, but it is a serious weakness and we are paying for it now.
First, lets start with the mistakes that led to the current situation.
- In February we got our state and federal tax refunds and these were never deposited into our savings accounts. I moved the money out of our checking but left them in the savings account tied to it.
- Also, in March we got my husband’s yearly bonus and this was also sent to this savings account.
- Then in March we have the visit from my sister and this led to extra spending.
- My husband took charge of paying medical bills while I paid the rest but we never sat down to go over all of this together.
Where are we now? After going over all of our bank transactions since February and having paid off everything that was owed, we are “missing” $1400. Some of it is the money we spent while my sister was here. Our dogs also had their yearly check up for a total of $380. We did buy a DVD player for a trip we have this summer (more on that later) but that was $200. The rest is unaccounted for.
I am a bit disappointed in this. This means less money we can send to savings, but at least is not debt we incurred which I am glad about. Between now and the end of June I am pushing our budget harder to make up some of this money. I have made a list of the money we have coming in from now until then and a plan of how we are going to pay ourselves back this money. I just realized something, I feel disappointed because maybe even if we didn’t incur any credit card debt, we took this money from our planned savings and I feel we are now our own creditors. Umm, interesting thought.
I leave you with this now. We are heading down to Chicago this weekend. Have a great one!
