Pay day (woot!) and Church updates...

Last month I worked a good deal of overtime co-teaching a lifeguard certification course at work and now I get to reap the happy benefits of it... My paycheck grew by $190.91 (that's take home pay folks), so we have that much more floating around in the budget this month. Since we don't have to get my fiance's passport immediately since our cruise hasn't worked out as planned (and the certificates are still coming by mail), we decided to knock out one of our 2 remaining annual bills... The car registration fee for South County Boy's wheels. I know we just paid this bill in March when he moved here, but money will be tighter come January when we add my then hubby onto my work health insurance plan, and we won't have a lot of extra money floating around then, so its best if we can stock up some cash to help cover those expenses now then try scrambling in the early months of the year.

So we plunked $154.00 into our registration savings account... and we still have $36.91 in overtime that will remain in this months budget for the time being. We paid just the minimum on the mortgage for the second month in a row (and I wish I would have woke up and started doing this months ago) and set aside money for the HOA bill and for some church giving.

Speaking of church, it looks like my church will not renew our building lease at the end of the month, and with no plans to rent another church space, there will definenetly be a lot of things changing within our little community. We may just focus on meeting throughout the week in a small group bible study type settings and gather weekly or monthly to do service projects instead of trying to have a formal service. We just don't have the congregation size to pay for a building, and the hours we pour into creating a service may be better spent on a Sunday morning serving at a local food kitchen (they never have enough volunteers on a Sunday because everyone is in church). Since my church will no longer be "depending" on giving and tithes to make rent, we may start donating to small projects when they need funding so the amount we monthly "give" might go down each month as we donate more time, and really start to develop hands on ministry projects. This is actually really exciting for me since i've been missing ministry opportunities because we were tied to a building we couldn't afford... but I still get the small group community aspects as well. Maybe we will actually be the church istead of trying to "have" church.