So I never should have celebrated yesterday about how our emergency/baby fund has grown. Call me superstitious, but later that day, I checked NT's student account to see whether the remaining financial aid had transferred over and paid his summer tuition. Not only had it not, they had socked us with a $30 late fee!
After some stressed-out calls to the University, NT and AS determined that his summer classes don't qualify for financial aid (even though he was awarded $3750 more than he needed for spring classes) because he's "not enrolled at least half time." Um, yeah he is; he's actually taking this summer class to get done even faster! But apparently, they mean "at this moment in time are you taking at least half the credits of a regular semester?" Soo, the upshot was that he's most likely not getting any financial aid for this class, which, with the late fee, costs just under $1800. And we had to pay it off fast or risk getting hit with another late fee.
So where to come up with $1800? The obvious answer is our EF, which wouldn't have hurt much if we weren't expecting a baby. NOW it feels like we're taking away a valuable safety net from under our baby's feet if we take it out of the EF.
NT suggested we have an even more laid-back vacation in August-September. We've already spent about $1300 on the two cottages and the rental car, and we had $1600 for food, drink, spa, boating, and all other fun activities. At NT's suggestion we shaved $900 off that. We'll now have $700, which means not enough for massages or boat rental or lake cruises, but we should still be able to eat out once or twice, maybe take the ferry to Washington Island, go bowling, play mini-golf, see a movie, etc. And we can look around for free activities, and take tons of books and games with us. It'll still be a good time, and hopefully even more relaxing since we won't be trying to cram a bunch of activities in.
Of course, that still leaves $900 (well, $894.77, to be exact). For the time being, to get the tuition paid, we took that amount from our EF savings. But we really don't want to do that, so today we'll be looking at places we can cut our budget down even further to make up the $900. Compared to a lot of SA bloggers, we actually have a lot of fat in our budget. So it'll hurt, but hopefully we can come up with the other $900 out of our upcoming budget over the next few months. We can't simply reduce EF contributions as we have for other budget cuts such as the furloughs; that would be defeating the purpose of not affecting our baby fund. So I suspect it'll mostly come out of groceries (so long, fake meats and pricier fruits and veg) and spending money (buh-bye, hopes of saving up for a bike).
The one bright spot in all this is that it isn't an unexpected expense. We just didn't expect to be paying it until 2012. It's for NT's education, and it will save us a bit of (admittedly tax-deductible) interest over the long haul. But this will definitely affect our quality of life more than any of the other recession-related cuts we've had to make, because we've already cut so much from our budget and because we can't simply reduce future savings as part of the cut.
All of this cumulative pressure has made AS (and all of us) feel that she doesn't have as much time to grow her sewing business, so she's stepping up her job-search efforts a bit. Yesterday she applied for a job similar to the one she got laid off from; without crazy co-workers and budget stress it would have been a good job, so hopefully she gets an interview. She'd be a really good fit, and it's actually for a college of art and design, so it ties in a bit with her sewing and dressmaking!
Good grief, this is turning into a long entry! OK, one more thing: Our snowflake hit the personal loan today, with $34 going to principal. $1875 down, $125 to go on our July debt goal.
Shh! Murphy can hear you... (plus small debt payment)
July 17th, 2009 at 03:18 pm
July 17th, 2009 at 03:25 pm 1247844344
July 17th, 2009 at 03:31 pm 1247844705
July 17th, 2009 at 04:02 pm 1247846579
July 17th, 2009 at 04:40 pm 1247848805
I appreciate the very positive perspective you've all taken on the situation. I'm trying to stay positive but I'm honestly sort of shell-shocked at all the hits my perfectly lovely budget and lifestyle have taken in the past 6-8 months. My Big-Picture Goal seems laughable now, when in early to mid-2008 it seemed like I couldn't fail.
At the same time, though, I do feel the same way as you guys and do appreciate that we are doing very well in our organization and communication, without which we'd be financially floundering, not just belt-tightening.
Without this blog community I'd be struggling more with feeling like a failure for having to adjust our lifestyle. We are fairly unique among our friends in how we use a budget to regulate spending, so it would be easy to feel like we're not doing as well as others (and for me to thus feel like I was letting my family down). When I talk about it here, though, I realize we're doing what's smart and good for our future (and present).
It definitely helps that NT and AS are staunch supporters of my way of doing things. We trust one another to find the best solutions.
July 17th, 2009 at 06:37 pm 1247855829
We're headed to Door County in late August too. I'll scout some bargains for you!
July 17th, 2009 at 07:02 pm 1247857378
July 17th, 2009 at 10:30 pm 1247869854
something for me to aim for !!
July 18th, 2009 at 01:29 am 1247880553
You may find that leaving out the fake meats lead you to feel even healthier. I know for myself, when I was attempting to not eat very much of the fake meats, I did the best ever at losing weight - and keeping my grocery bill down. The fake meats are not getting any less expensive ... I really should go back to not hardly eating them myself.
July 18th, 2009 at 04:13 am 1247890419
Belated congratulations!