Surprise, surprise. I got a bill from the dental surgeon, whose office said I was only responsible for $1615, asking me for another $1785. $3400, much closer to what I was expecting to pay. Still expecting to pay $1646 at the other dentist for whatever it is they do to my implant, taking total to $5046. I think I predicted that exact number!

So, really glad I took out the full $5K in flex spending!

Of course, if I'd known this, I wouldn't have distributed cards to AS and NT and had all of us spending them up. I've only got 2 cards with $500 needed. In a fit of pique last night, I signed up for a Southwest Visa, where I pay a $99 annual fee but get $500 in gift cards for spending $2000. (And potentially the annual fee gets waived.) I'll use that to pay the dental bill.

Today I checked which credit cards don't charge foreign transaction fees, and of the reward cards remaining, only NT's CapOne (which needs only $300 more of spending) is fee-free. I did hold onto the Barclay cards just in case for this trip, so AS and I will bring those. But that means we won't be able to do much reward spending on the trip.

That's OK. I've avoided using the reward cards for grocery purchases (since we get 6% on our Amex) or Target or Amazon purchases (since we get 5% off with our specialty cards for those stores), but we can always use the cards for that if we need to top up to get the spending done in time to get the bonus.

My guest blog was accepted! I'll post a link once it's published. There was no talk of pay, which was fine for one post, but this is a professionally run site, so I won't be doing more posts for them if they don't pay anything. Still, it was really fun and exciting to get that attention from my ordinarysavers.com website.

We grownups decided to forgo Valentine's gifts for each other this year. What with our kid-free date last week, the Puerto Rico trip this coming week and birthdays in March, we didn't feel the need. I'll probably pick up a couple cheap treats for the kids tomorrow, though goodness knows they won't need them, what with daycare kids exchanging treats AND my parents sending them each a goodie bag.

There's been lots of scary yet exhilarating talk in our house of potential job changes. AS was rather stressed that if new jobs meant a net lower income, we wouldn't hit our target for moving out of the condo.

Job stress has been a major downer in our household. As much as I want to pay off our debt and move to a bigger home, I realized that a happier home life is more important to me by far.

So I promised AS that if our overall income lowered, I'd actually move debt payoff to the bottom of priorities. If that still didn't allow us to hit our goals, we could look at temporarily cutting out wants such as travel, housekeeping and charitable giving. I swore that renovating and saving up for a move would be the main priority. That made her feel much better.

One of the changes was NT looking for a job. He's updated his resume and identified three or four jobs to apply for. He did speak to a higher-up at his job who's still talking the talk about hiring help and/or giving him a raise, so he hasn't completely counted them out, but since they've been talking for a lo-o-ong time, he's going to still look for jobs just in case they're stringing him along. If he gets an offer, maybe that will spur them to act on their promises.

Either way, whether he gets help and a raise, or a new job that inspires him and isn't 50 hours a week, we'll be much better off soon!