Let's see, there's been a lot of little money-in, money-out activity since my last post.

I took a sick day on Tuesday simply because I hadn't gotten much sleep for a few days and it was messing me up. I have plenty of sick PTO (I rarely take even half of it) and I could see my work projects could all wait a day without burdening any co-workers, so I did it.

Felt much recovered after sleeping in most of the morning. In the afternoon AS and I went for a longish walk and ended up by a cafe she had a free beer coupon for, so we stopped in. I bought myself a glass of wine for $8. I was feeling a tad sheepish about that spending because I was already planning to go out that night and have a couple drinks with friends. But it was nice to have a leisurely drink with AS.

I got on the bus for my happy hour in plenty of time, but the bus ended up in standstill traffic, turning a 35-minute ride into 1 hour 20 minutes! And I happened to get the bus that doesn't cross the bridge to where I needed to go, so I walked across (another 10 minutes). Ended up being nearly an hour late to the happy hour. Luckily my two college alumni friends were unfazed, and we had a fabulous time. I was going to only order 1 drink but after my ordeal I had 2 drinks plus an appetizer. When I pulled my wallet out at the end, one friend stopped me; he hadn't seen either of us in about a year and wanted to pay our tabs! Phew, he saved me going about $45 more in the hole on my spending money!

Later in the week I started planning my and AS's Wisconsin trip to see my fave band. I bought tickets for both shows; I put my and AS's on shared spending since this is my 2nd solo trip (we each got 2 this year), but I also bought a friend's ticket who is joining us for one of the shows and put that on my own spending (which put me back in the hole).

Less than an hour after I booked those tickets, the band finally announced a Minneapolis show in November! I'd given up on them playing here anytime soon, which is why I wanted the WI trip. Well, I'm not going to pass up seeing them at First Avenue, the legendary Minneapolis club I saw them at last November, so I bought 3 tickets (me and NT and AS) and added that to my personal spending deficit (they're just humoring me by coming ). I'm now quite a bit in the hole again, but I'll make it up gradually!

I also got me and AS a hotel for the first night of Wisconsin ($72). I was going back and forth with my friend who works in the hotel industry and is going to join us for the second night from Chicago. I tried to find a VRBO or AirBNB place but couldn't find anything that worked. He checked his corporate discount with a chain that must be affiliated with his group of hotels, and they gave him a double room for only $59! And it's much nicer than the $72 room AS and I will be in the night before! Without his discount the cheapest I was finding was about $140 for a modest hotel, whereas this will be a nicer place for less than half the cost. Definitely worth splitting a room!

We haven't worked out whether he will pay for it or not. I've bought his show ticket, but he bought me and AS drinks the last time we saw him, so we owed him at least that. Maybe we'll buy him dinner and drinks to cover the hotel.

I did have to rent a car because my friend that was thinking about going couldn't get the time off work. So that will be about $175 for 3 days, plus gas.

That and the hotel don't get charged to the credit card until we use them, so there is about $250 not showing up in the shared spending deficit. The tickets did come out immediately.

AS got paid nearly $300 for 2 weeks of teaching at one of her college gigs, and I factored in our October budget surplus of about $300 plus about $15 in CapOne rewards. I set aside $175 for renovations but the rest went to the budget deficit. We also kept grocery spending about $70 under budget and applied that budget surplus to the deficit.

So, as it stands, the deficit is at about $3600, much better than the $3900+ we were at. Of course we have the $250 in trip costs that would technically make it $3850, but we'll hopefully get more income before those costs come due.

Meanwhile, NT is still in England. I'd withdrawn 1,000 pounds from the EF for him to use for spending money while he was there. He emailed me to check in; he felt he'd stayed under that, and his mom and grandma had each given him 500 pounds to put toward home renovations!

I checked the UK account and he'd only used about 400 of the 1,000, and had deposited 1,000 from his family, so he was technically 1,600 ahead of the game! I emailed him back that he may as well take the 1,000 back out and we could put it toward the renovation fund in the U.S. But even if he doesn't get a chance to do that, it'll be a nice boost to our EF, so I'm happy either way.

AS pointed out that we could put some of the money to the deficit! It hadn't even occurred to me since the relatives earmarked it for our renovations. But I suppose one reason the deficit is still there is because I have continued to put one-third of AS's net pay into renovation savings. So it seems fair to put part of the relatives' gift toward the deficit. We'll see how much we end up with when NT comes home (which is Monday!! Yay!).

Another interesting money thing that happened just today: Someone had left a bag of DVDs, video games and books out on the curb marked "Free." I grabbed it on the way home from the grocery store. I passed a Little Free Library and put a few books in that, then brought the rest home. I checked eBay for whichg items might sell for more than a couple bucks, and listed about 10 of them. Most for a couple bucks each, but one of the more expensive ones, a video game, has already sold for $24! So I feel like my effort already paid off enough to be worth it. If none of the others sell, I'll sock them away for the neighborhood garage sale in the spring. We already have a ton of clothes and a few toys, but it'd be nice to have some other things besides.

I was daydreaming about getting a promotion and raise today, but it hasn't happened. However, I'm still feeling good about the possibility if I keep selling my supervisor on the idea. I was thinking I'd raise NT's retirement a little and keep the rest for renovations, travel and general spending. But we'll see. If Roth IRA limits get raised next year, I'd definitely target that first. It's all speculation, anyway, at this point.

That's it on the money front, I think. NT gets home Monday afternoon; AS and I and the kids have done pretty well but I'll be happy to get the family unit back together!