Weekend

I told you on Saturday that we broke our own rule.  We promised ourselves we would not eat out during the month of September, to make up for the asinine amount of money we spent eating out in August.  I am more disappointed today than I was on Saturday night.  I'm catching up on all the money we spent over the weekend, and I just keep thinking of ways we could have done better!

In all (including food, decorations, gifts, and party favors), we spent $90 on Piglet 1's party.  That's $50 over my original budget of $40.  I think it would be a conservative estimate to say we usually spend closer to $150 or even $200 on Piglet 1's parties (last year I spent $75 on food alone), especially now that he's in school and inviting his friends.  We hosted twenty five people at his party.  That includes only five school friends and the rest were family members.  We would have had more people come, but Pen's immediate family wasn't able to make it. 

I was drained by Saturday afternoon and the only thing I wanted in the whole entire world was to get drunk get these people out of my house take a nap!  We went out for pizza with my mother and younger brother and Pen's grandmother.  The charge on our debit card was $43, but my mother gave us $16 for her portion, so in all we only spent $27.  That's a far cry from the almost $500 we spent in August, but still, I find myself disappointed.

Pen and I have been trying to make a habit of going over our finances every Sunday afternoon.  Yesterday, I was telling him how much extra we have had to spend this month to catch up on old bills (current total is almost $650), and how we could have applied that amount of money to the new couch or the dishwasher we so desperately need.  He's never taken much of an interest in our finances before, but he's making the effort to maintain eye contact with me while I'm talking about all this.  Anyway, we decided to set up some short-term and long-term goals.

When we were getting out of credit card debt we did something similar.  I wrote "Remember your Goals" on all our debit cards and on my check book to remind me of what our goals were.  We wanted to pay off our credit card debt, buy a house, get a better car, and start saving for Piglet 1's college education.  Well, we paid off the debt, bought a house, and got a better car, but we didn't do it the "right way"(high interest rates, not saving up enough of a down payment before we bought the house, etc.).

Some of our new goals are to pay off 20% of our mortgage so we don't have to pay PMI anymore, have an 8 month emergency fund (still figuring out how much that should be), and to save enough money to drywall four rooms of our house and put in new carpet. 

Anyway, this post is kind of all over the place, and I apologize for that!  I'm still recovering from the weekend and my sugar high from all the cake and ice cream. 

Laters!