It's been a week. But finally got my annual budget "finalized"
January 10th, 2026 at 06:29 amIf you want to know how my week went, you just need to know I live in south Minneapolis. I was actually being an observer when I got an alert on my phone that another observer had been shot about 10 minutes drive from where I was parked keeping an eye on a suspicious vehicle idling. I rushed to that scene probably minutes after Renee Good was taken away. Ever since then everything has ramped up. Schools were closed the rest of the week after Border Patrol invaded a high school not far from my daughter's. ICE swarmed my particular little neighborhood all day today abducting people. Etc. etc. etc. Been trying to do my part and just feeling overwhelmed so I haven't gotten much done this week.
Plus we still haven't got clarity on some of the healthcare costs we were hoping to understand before we settled on annual budget targets. But I decided to make some assumptions and finalize the budget to the best of my ability.
It's an ambitious budget. We had to up our grocery, mortgage, health insurance, medical expense and summer camp categories. We chose to up our travel, spending money, kids and family fun categories. We're facing lower fixed revenue due to health premiums and mortgages eating into our income. So it's on me and AS to bring in a lot more dough. We did get an offer to both go 30 hours a week at a place for about 3-4 months in the spring which would give us a very good push toward our ambitious goal of $164K gross income in our business. (Last year we made about $110K.) We do expect some bits of income in the form of NT's side hustle, CC rewards, and maybe a few things like that, so potentially AS and I wouldn't have to make that whole amount ourselves. If the ACA pandemic credits get reinstated that would also take down that needed amount by a grand or two. We're going to go for it for a couple months and then reassess if we need to scale back some of our "wants" based on whether we seem to be in sight of that big income target or not.
I was gonna post some more detailed numbers but I'm so tired from the week, I think I'll leave it at that. Hope everyone else is having a calmer 2026 than we are so far!