We're back from our vacation! Contrary to my prediction, we spent a TON on the trip. We spent on food, because there wasn't a single home-cooked meal. We spent out of boredom -- the grownups would take turns one staying at the hotel while the other two went out to have drinks after the kids were in bed. We spent to treat family members to meals -- we bought lunch for my sister and niece, aquarium admission for another niece, dinner for AS's mom once, and food for my mom a couple times. (People also treated us to meals so it wasn't one-sided.) We spent from disorganization -- we'd let the kids pack and they left out some significant articles of clothing, so we hit a thrift store to buy stuff they could use.
All told I think we spent around $180 a day, and that's not counting flights, car rental or hotel. Yikes!
But whatever. We're back, we survived, and our shared spending deficit is up around $4K. We did get it down through AS freelance income and September budget surplus, but then back-to-school stuff and unreimbursed expenses from AS's trip brought it back up.
A warm-weather trip during Xmas break certainly seems like a pipe dream now, but that's OK if we can't swing it. We've traveled a TON recently and NT still has his UK trip in September. I'm actually contemplating a road trip with AS in October to Wisconsin -- my favorite band is playing in two WI towns on two consecutive nights! But that wouldn't be a very expensive trip. But I'm holding off committing to that one right now.
A shared-spending deficit is more annoying than anything. We can float that kind of deficit in the budget indefinitely since we're always about a month ahead in terms of paying bills. And we have almost 5x the amount of the deficit in savings, so we could easily pay it off at any time. So I'm not going to get in the dumps about it; I'll just keep pecking away however I can.
At least we've been able to stay under budget on groceries every week, so I've been putting that toward it. But that's just a drop in the bucket. We don't really have anything we could sell to raise extra money. I'm subtly trying to position myself for a raise and promotion but there's no guarantee that'll happen anytime soon. AS is always booking new work, so that's our best bet for getting rid of it. There is the possibility of a Xmas bonus for NT in December, so if we haven't eliminated the deficit by then, that would probably help us wipe it out.
So long story short, I'm reporting it to keep myself accountable for reconciling this deficit, but I don't feel that bad about it.
And the beat goes on
August 24th, 2017 at 04:00 pm
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