Weekly Updates (Spending, Work, & Money Goals)

Weekly Spending-ish

We had a few unexpected things happen this week so we decided not to spend our $75 refund check on Costco extras. We budget $250 a month for groceries and since we only have 4 grocery shopping weeks this month, we will be using the extra $50 in our normal grocery amount for the necessities like laundry soap, conditioner, ect. The treats will have to wait till later in the month to see if we can work them in since we had an unplanned trip to Walmart on our docket. SCB's wrists have been killing him lately so we got him two good wrist supports. We also picked up some personal care items for him while we were there.

My moms birthday is coming up next month and she likes this discontinued perfume from Avon... so we went ahead and ordered it off Amazon for her because it was the last one in stock and it was a great deal even with shipping. We will pair the perfume with some flowers and take her out to dinner somewhere most likely. We also have 2 other birthdays to plan for this month. My "aunt" and my old roommate. We attended a nice birthday dinner at the Cheese Cake Factory for my old roommate on Friday and we picked her up a $25 gift card to Target for her birthday because its her favorite place to shop and her and her boyfriend are trying to save money, so whether it helps with groceries, clothes, books, CDs, it was a good choice. For my "aunt" we are planning on picking her up some candles she likes and pairing it with a cat figuring we picked up at the street fair over our honeymoon. We may toss in a bottle of wine or something but we haven't decided yet. In our new married budget (which I will post once SCB gets his next check since he did change his withholding) you will see a new birthday fund is set up. We are going to start setting aside $50 a month (like we do for Christmas) to cover birthdays so we aren't scrambling around once we get really focused on our goals. 

This week also started a few firsts for us. We got PERSONAL fun money! SCB spent his on Mountain Dew, Mountain Dew, and some quick fast food type meals while working. Fresh & Easy had a sale on Mountain Dew, 4 for $11 so he got 8 cases for $23.49 (after a $5 off $25 coupon) in addition to the 4 cases I worked into our regular food budget! We won't be adding our personal spending to our weekly spending logs since the whole point is for SCB and I to have money we don't have to tell the other person what we spent it on... but he wanted to highlight his Mountain Dew purchase and picture. But I will add when we each get fun money to our weekly spending updates.

Fun Money:
$40 South County Girl
$40 South County Boy

September 4

• Fresh & Easy: $53.05
• McDonalds: $8.08 (breakfast date)
• Gasoline: SCB $60.49 (ya, $60 for a single fill up... gas hit $3.99 again this week.)

September 5

• Walmart: $34.44 & $23.10
• Amazon.com: $15.99 (My mom's birthday gift for next month)
• Target: $23.65 --Friends Birthday (I bought the gift card and a card with a partial gift card I had gotten from Offermatic)

September 6

• Electric Bill: $44.67

September 7
September 8
September 9

• Cheese Cake Factory: $50.00
• Mortgage Payment: $808.18

September 10

• Gas for SCB: $37.34
• Prescription Refill $4.00
• Walmart: 38.20 (Black T-shirt, Yoga Pants, gum, Pencils, and 2 cereal storage containers)
• Islands: $27.00

Job & Work Updates:

Both of us are still happily earning money, which is really spiffy :) Work has been an adventure for me balancing a lot of  crazy things all at once and its only going to start getting busier next month as I begin to roll out and plan a huge work sponsored event. I'll be cherishing our vacation and break from everything that's not our cruise. In terms of work for me, I did work the Monday holiday so my next paycheck will have some overtime on it, plus about 3 hours of overtime from a Harassment training day we had. The last 2 paychecks I've had have been "normal" for me (the first few checks that haven't had any overtime on since SCB moved to California)... But October should be a busy month for me so that won't be the case there... which is probably good because SCB isn't getting paid vacation for our cruise because he hasn't been there long enough. He also picked up a partial shift on Saturday so he may get some overtime for the week if he's paid for Labor Day (which I believe he is).

Money Goals:

Since we finished the Xbox fund, I got to remove it from our goals list. We got to add $220 from house sitting into our Travel fund for our honeymoon. (The balance in there is after we paid for our para-sailing excursion!). We didn't add anything to the Roth IRA with the hubby's first paycheck because we needed to pay for the unexpected prescriptions that we ordered... But I just got paid and once the money gets transferred we should be adding around $160 to the fund and adding more to our giving accounts.

We also took $50 from SCB's paycheck to set aside our Costco Renewal fee for next year. In case you don't know, I like to save up all my annual bills ahead of time so when I get them I can just take the money out of savings to pay for them and not worry. We have our car registration stickers for 2012 already saved, and now we have our Costco bill saved up as well. All we have left is our AAA bill since our insurance bills are budgeted in Monthly... but those bills should be coming in any day now for home owner and earthquake insurance.      

• Operation Roth IRA: $327.73/$5,000.00... 6.55% Saved
• Travel Fund: $480.10
• Child Share Fund: $92.00
• General Giving: $164.00