Getting back into the swing of things

While we are waiting for the professional photos, you can enjoy some of these...

We are slowly getting back to normal and accustomed to our new married lifestyle so posts will slowly be coming back to normal over the next week or so.

Last week we ate most of our meals out, didn't bother cooking much, and spent the week off after the wedding playing catch up and running errands (not your typical honeymoon- but our real one is in September).

Because of all of our unexpected stuff this month ($400 for new tires... new phones on the same carrier $300, cleaning my wedding dress $130, etc) mixed with the things we knew about, like our $400 car maintenance check... we are most likely going to change up our goals as we start our married life style.

We may finish off the Emergency fund with my extra paycheck and start focusing on the Roth IRA come August. The car repairs were a nice wake up call that as our cars get older, we should have separate savings for those repairs so they don't come out of our emergency fund... Besides the car check up, we needed to get  something flushed and another thing cleaned.... and then they dropped the ball that I needed 4 brand new tires too...  Thankfully the guy at Toyota is a friend of mine and he gave me some additional discounts on the flush and the other maintenance work the car needed. We decided to get the tires done at Costco because it would be cheaper in the long run because we found a $100 off coupon in the Costco coupon booklet we received in the mail.

So we spent one day of our honeymoon getting my car serviced, another day getting tires replaced... and that's only just part of the car issues we have had to deal with this week.

Apparently my sister got into a car accident a couple of weeks ago (her fault again) and after getting her car back, found out that her transmission is shot because she took it to bad mechanics the last few years who never properly cleaned it out. She decided to wake my husband and I up at 8:30am on our honeymoon to insist that we loan her one of our cars because she "needed" it and we obviously could loan her one because we both had the week off of work. (this is the 4th accident she's been in that's been her fault).

Thankfully at the time, we were able to tell her no because it needed new tires and we had to do that to the car so she couldn't borrow it... But that didn't stop her from roping us into playing car shuffle with my mom so her car could be picked up from the shop and dropped off at a new mechanic place and then to get the rental car returned... Basically if we didn't help out my mom would have had to walk all over town for her BEFORE she had to go to work because my mom can't tell my sister no.

Oh ya, and then get this, we had to pick her up from work too because she was having a little party at her place and none of her friends could come get her. In the end so we wouldn't be further inconvenienced on our honeymoon, we ended up loaning my mom our car so my sister could borrow her truck for a few days and went everywhere in SCB's car... with No AC and No radio... but it was better to put up with all of that then to deal further with her.  

The next morning we woke up to the phone ringing... for some reason it was my mom calling SCB at again, 8am... when I picked up the phone and said hello, I got cussed out... Apparently my mom miss dialed and called SCB instead of my sister... She was walking down the road in the morning rain/mist to pick up my sister's stupid car... So again, in our PJ's we headed down and picked up my mom and did the car swap shuttle thing... (we just couldn't sit in bed knowing she was walking down the street in the rain...)

Ya, my sister also tried to convince my mom to buy a new car (a $37,000 car mind you) so she could borrow the truck from my mom and save up more money... We had to convince my mom that buying a car from LA that she has never seen and never driven was a bad idea... and about twice what she wanted to pay for a car in the first place.

Yes, my mom is a HUGE pushover when it comes to my sister. Thankfully, my mom didn't buy the car, but somehow my sister did. She let go of a car she almost outright owned ($2500 left) because she couldn't afford 3-4k in repairs for a new transmission... all because she could afford the monthly payments on the 37,000 car instead..... STUPID.

Thankfully the rest of our week went much smoother. We had ourselves a little Harry Potter marathon at home... and then went to the OC fair on Friday because it was free entrance and free parking day.... we did errands and grocery shopping for this up coming week, mowed through piles of laundry from having house guests and no time to do laundry while they were there... and ended our weekend with the last Harry Potter flick. I made SCB sit through all the credits so I could properly mourn the end of an era.

I'll post the hard numbers later for everyone on all of our spending in my next post...