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Home > Sort-of good news for the budget deficit

Sort-of good news for the budget deficit

August 30th, 2017 at 03:27 am

Two recent curveballs, my chipped tooth and the wasp infestation outside our house, are blessedly less than the worst-case scenario.

For my tooth, I was picturing expensive restoration, but the dentist actually suggested just smoothing it down, which I readily agreed to. She called what I had a "limited exam." I'm hoping that means all or part of it is covered by insurance. They didn't have an estimate yet when I was ready to go so they just said they'd mail me a bill if need be. Fingers crossed it's only $30 or $40!

For the wasps, they were inside the wall so I was picturing having to take down the stucco on the outside or the drywall on the inside. But they were able to just spray and said that should take care of it. $118.55, which I consider way less than some of my more grim imaginings.

I did get a $35 bill for the kids' doctor visit last month, but I'm going to check in with the insurance company, because it was a well-child visit with nothing out of the ordinary, so I believe it should be 100% covered.

On the upside, our September utilities bill came in $26.80 under budget, so I put that bit of money against the shortfall. Since the school lunches will be free this year, I requested a refund of the account balance, so we'll be getting $9.40 which I already counted toward the deficit.

On the minus side, some of our recurring monthly donations/subscriptions came through, and I signed AA up for art classes for $189.

All told, the deficit stands at about $4100. I keep telling myself that it would be worse if we weren't putting snowflakes toward mitigating it.

I'm already working on next week's menu and grocery list, trying to keep it minimal so we can put some of the budget toward the deficit. It may not be as big a chunk as last week but maybe I can swing $50 to put toward it. We'll see.

Besides just the annoyance of the deficit, my other incentive is that I really, really want to go to Wisconsin for 2 nights to see my favorite band in October. I don't have enough personal spending money for that and wouldn't feel comfortable adding to the shared spending deficit unless we were well on our way to making it up. If we've made a decent amount of progress, maybe I can split the cost between shared spending and my personal money. But not if it keeps hovering around $4K. It will have to be quite a bit lower than that!

I half-heartedly reactivated my Mechanical Turk account, thinking about raising some bits of money that way. But AS thinks if I'm going that route, I may as well just look for real freelance writing/editing work and get paid a decent amount for my time. So I'm vaguely considering that. I'm also still tooting my own horn at work in hopes of a promotion; I got a really good praise email from the company president and forwarded it right along to my direct supervisor.

2 Responses to “Sort-of good news for the budget deficit”

  1. My English Castle Says:
    1504065571

    Less bad is sort of good!

  2. rob62521 Says:
    1504103202

    Glad things didn't turn out as grim as you thought. Maybe a little hope on the horizon....

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