What a weird, weird month it's been financially. Mostly good though! Our home values and retirement account values both went up and we paid the minimum on our mortgages, which netted us over $50K in net worth! Yes, we are an asset-multimillionaire household once again.

We also heard back about our individual taxes (the business ones got done a while ago) and somehow, bizarrely, we are getting a cumulative $16K back in refunds from state and federal over our two sets of returns (NT and I file together as the legally married pair while AS files as single).

We had been running about a $4K deficit in our budget, so we'll be able to wipe that out and start June in balance again. It's been a really long time since I gave any of us spending-money bonuses, so I'm setting aside $7K of it to do that ($2K per adult, $500 per kid). I'm also setting aside $2500 for tax prep fees because I can't remember what we were quoted and I know our taxes are complex. (Our previous guy charged about $1200; I know it'll be more but I don't think it's double, but I want to play it safe. Our new accountants are GOOD though, so worth the extra expense.) I also want to put about $1K into the savings account where we keep our renters' security deposits, because it's been a bit under what it's supposed to be for a couple months and I want to bring it back into balance for peace of mind (even though all our renters just re-upped for the year or are about to).

That leaves a little under $2K, which we might just hang onto; I know there are some little home improvements and some spring yard work for our place and the rental property, so it's good to have a little wiggle room.

But I'm also tempted to put some of it in retirement beCAUSE! My CoastFIRE calculation is showing that we are only $4,224 away! We aren't putting much toward retirement these days (ever since I got laid off about a year ago), just $250/month into NT's 401(k), so it'd take about 16 months to put that much into retirement if we didn't put any extra in. So we'll see. Maybe I'll at least put a little bit in, like a grand or so, and get us a little closer to true Coasting!

Other than that, our financial life is bits of ups and downs. I'm tracking budget categories more carefully this year to get a more accurate snapshot of what our line items should be. Our medical spending is about $1000 over budget so far this year; as I mentioned our unbudgeted spending was about $4000, so at present we're running about $1K per month light, but I'm also interested to see if things even out, because our birthdays in March (including my lavish 50th bday party) and one bigger medical bill might've skewed things.

AS and I are doing pretty well with our business; not making as much as I'd initially hoped because a couple things fell through early on, but we're slowly building other clients, so maybe we'll eventually get close to what I hope we can make. I'll be interested to see where we end up at the end of this year; I'm pretty confident we can do better next year, because I was basically sidelined by viruses for 2 months this year and we're doing pretty well considering that.