Our biweekly $25 was transferred into savings, so I'm putting that toward our England trip: $2476 saved, $524 to go. AS just completed a freelance proofing job, so soon we'll get $600 or $700 (can't remember exactly) to put toward travel.
That's good, because I projected out the next six months or so, and I did some maneuvering so that we'll stay in our budget just fine, but we won't have ANY extra money (beyond the biweekly $25) to put toward travel until July at the earliest, and one of our trips will have already happened by then. I'm going to have a family meeting and see if they think we need more money for the Va. trip, and if so, what we should move around to do so. Thanks to momcents' recent blog post I'm feeling much more mellow about viewing our money as one big amount vs. separate untouchable buckets, so I feel confident we can come up with something.
Of course, I tried to be conservative in my estimates of our reduced paychecks, so I have some hope that they'll be a little higher than what I'm projecting, but not much. At some point my HR will give me a projection of what my checks will look like, but I'm not sure at what point they do that, and me being me I just had to work out some kind of rough estimate so we could be looking ahead.
A week and a half to go, if baby is planning to stick to the schedule! I just set up diaper cleaning service--weird! Have to figure out how I'm going to pay for that--leaning toward my medical-expense fund, since it's at a healthy level and doesn't feel as drastic as taking from the emergency fund. The good news is it's one lump sum that covers 12 weeks, so I only have to come up with it once--after that we're planning on managing the cleaning for ourselves, but we thought we could use any help we could get in the first couple months.
Progress on savings; preparations
February 25th, 2010 at 07:25 pm
February 25th, 2010 at 07:32 pm 1267126370
Diaper service is the best thing ever! My dispoable diaper friends never quite understood how super easy and convenient it was - we rented our diapers from them so they just showed up on our door every week - easy peasy. Anyway, you might get addicted.
February 25th, 2010 at 07:41 pm 1267126870
February 25th, 2010 at 08:36 pm 1267130177
Best of luck to you in your travel towards motherhood! Definitely the best trip I've ever taken (though the 6th grade drama has made me tired this week and one of mine is ill, so I'm sleep deprived!)
See you on the other side!
February 26th, 2010 at 05:30 am 1267162204
February 26th, 2010 at 11:13 pm 1267226031
Congratulations Jerry! I feel like diaper service is our big splurge of the whole babymaking process. At least we got a third of it paid for by a gift certificate from NT's co-workers...and we're going to TRY not to get hooked, but I take MonkeyMama's point that it could be very tempting.