The Budget Might Kill Me This Month
According to the magicial excel budget spreadsheet, we will be able to pay everything and be caught up this month. Which is fantastic, because once we are caught up our expenses plummet down to the bare minimums and that will make keeping caught up with bills much easier, and allow me to start putting money into savings again. Yea! Savings!
But every time I see our budget saying “you’re great” I try to figure it out, because it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be that peachy in my head. Kind of like how I said every month for like six months that I was going to pay the car off that month but it totally never happened until last month (I didn’t say anything to anyone to make sure it would actually happen. See, when things get bad I get superstitious!)
I know that it’s normal for things to look great in someone’s head but worse once it’s all out on paper, but not me. I add everything up and it looks great – but my brain cannot fathom it. Maybe it’s because we literally have like ten streams of income and some are tiny and some are large and I can’t wrangle them all in my head.
You might be thinking, why not just catch up with your tax return? Because of the way our student loan rehabilitation works we have to wait until April 18th (or beyond) to file our tax return so the refund isn’t confiscated by the government. (Even if you are currently in repayment, until you have made your nine payments and your loan has been transferred to another non-bill-collector lender your tax return is still taken.
Had I known this I would have waited to file last year’s taxes until this year, but no use planning things that already happened!
It’s okay we have to wait, because the refund is going to go into our savings account, except for $300 that Randy is going to use for the garden. We are going to order some dwarf pear trees and maybe a dwarf cherry tree as well. There’s a great nursery that sells a three pack of pear trees that are great for the climate we live in.
But we are sticking to the budget, not eating out, not spending any extraneous money at all, really. It’s just a matter of time until we have a lovely savings account and we are at a point where we can make some advance payments on the student loans. Until the loans are with the new lender we can’t do anything with them, including making extra payments, but that is not something we could have done this month anyway. Double mortgage is pretty much all our budget can handle in excess of the normal payments we make.
So I just keep working, Randy keeps working, and we do our best to be squirrels…amassing oodles of nuts in our little tree and hoarding our asses off. It’s not super-fun, and it’s certainly not glamorous, but you know what…it will be worth it.
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