I have my budget projected through May 15, which is unusual for me because usually I only have it laid out for the next month and a half. But we're saving all our surplus money for our trip to England in May, and I wanted to keep an eye on that to make sure we'd be able to save up enough.

For the past few weeks, we've been about $150-$160 short on the bottom line of my budget. That didn't really bother me because I knew we could scrape that much together by May 15. We've got things to sell on eBay, and NT works overtime fairly frequently, and our change jar at home has at least $50 in it.

This week, even with two unexpected expenses (a healthcare bill for me and license renewal for AS), we are finally showing a positive on the bottom line. Granted it's a positive of $6.80, but still, woo hoo! AS's paycheck was $7 more than expected, NT had $100 worth of overtime, and I had a benefits correction that will equal $9 more per paycheck. When I added all of that to the budget, we came out on top for May 15!

Granted, there are a couple variables we don't have funds socked away for (that's an eventual goal but not an urgent one) such as health and education incidentals. But we also have positive variables like the change jar, the eBay items and NT's tendency to work overtime. So I think it will balance out and we'll be fine for England. And just think, if I hadn't checked my first 2008 paycheck carefully, I might not have noticed that $9 mistake and we'd still be behind on our budget as I write this!