Beyond all odds....

Our Emergency Fund
Despite our "off budget month" it looks like we managed to pull it off and come out unscathed. Despite everything that happened this month, in a few days when the transfers go through, our emergency fund will be sitting pretty at $11,000.00........

Yup, that's right. We have our emergency fund done for the time being. If we break down our expenses and cut out all extras our budget gets really simple...

• Mortgage $808.18
• HOA $262.50
• Gasoline/car $200
• Groceries & Food $200
• Insurance Premiums $143
• Utility Bills ( Phones, internet, electric) $230

Together that's $1,843.68 a month, times 6 months = $11,062.08... and that's with us keeping the internet package on our cell phones. We figure we could get by with $200 a month on food since we'd do more batch cooking and we wouldn't end up tossing our stuff or letting things get wasted or go bad. Not bad for two 25 year olds just starting out :) Its our goal to try and keep the balance at 11k, and maybe add an additional 1k every year starting next year.

Presents for the twins...
We have also had a few comments on what we did for presents for the twins... and here's what we managed.

• For the twin, my sister wouldn't give us an option that fit in our budget that didn't involve alcohol. She either wanted us to spend a lot of money at EXPRESS for a really nice button up shirt, or stick $50 on a gift card to Game Stop... (because anything less meant he wouldn't be able to use the gift card to actually get anything from the store.) So, since we were running out of time, we just went to Costco and picked up a case of beer for him and stuck a bow on it. Not our most shinning gift giving moment, but SCB was okay with it because it meant we solved the problem because he was not okay with putting that much money on a gift card (and neither was I). So we grabbed a 36 case box of beer and brought that... $23.48
• For my sister's fiance, we picked up a UCLA bowl he wanted from the $0.99 cent store so he would have something to unwrap and inside the card we wrote that we got him the Movie he wanted (The greatest game ever played) and the TV show he wanted (Season 2 of eastbound and out) off Amazon since we couldn't find them in the store (the movie has been out for a long time and the Season doesn't come out till August 2nd). The Amazon purchases ended up costing us $28.98, but we have an Offermatic offer for $10 off a purchase of $20 on Amazon because I liked Offermatic on facebook a while ago and we occasionally get good offers from that... so in a few weeks that purchase will end up only costing is $18.98

Considering my sister wanted us to spend $50 a pop on them, I think we did really good with the little notice we had to plan for them... My mom actually went to bat for us and told my sister to give us options that were actually in our price range...

It was also nice that SCB and I got to work together to figure out how we want to handle gift giving as a married couple since his family normally doesn't spend much at all on each other when it comes to holidays and gift giving and my family tries to buy one another's love with gifts...  So it looks like we will keep the $50 budget for my mom and sister (and immediate family members), and keep other relatives to the $30 or so range. With this in mind, we should be able to better outline our holiday gift giving. In case you didn't know, Christmas is about 5 months away....

And speaking of Offermatic, we also cashed in some points we earned through the site to get a $25 gift card to Target for free. We are going to use it to stock up on either household cleaning supplies that I hate to buy, or we will try and keep it for holiday shopping.