I’m back!

As my regular readers (if there are any) may have noticed, I’ve been away for almost two weeks. Todd and I have had quite a lot of things going on in our extended family, and have had to move our focus to those immediate matters for a bit. Not that everything has cleared up now, but at least I’m back at home (for a few days) and looking forward to getting back into the old routine. Who would have thought that a couple of weeks of craziness would actually make me MISS work a little bit? Or at least miss the regularity of going to work every day.

I thought, for some reason, that waiting around in hospitals would mean plenty of time to read and reflect — which goes to show that I’ve never spent much time waiting around in hospitals!

Of course, the next few days at work are going to be crazy, trying to catch up from being out suddenly. Then, next week, we work only three days before heading off for our mental and emotional long-weekend retreat in the Finger Lakes. In other words, next week will be crazy too. I’ll try to start getting back on track with this project, and the blog, but it may be the very end of September before things really start calming down again.

Friday Finance Update – What Happened to Mr. and Ms. Moneybags?

Ironically, just as we finished entering all our account information into Quicken and started feeling really proud of ourselves for having our finances so in order, we realized last night that somehow (isn’t it always a mystery?) we’ve been spending way outside our norm for this entire summer. I’m afraid we just got a little cocky this summer after we got Todd’s bonus. It just seemed like there were reams of money.

After talking through our summer, Scott and I came to the conclusion that with my vast dental bills, putting in a new fence, the mission trip to Belize and some pricey (but worth it!) summer camps for T that we hadn’t exactly wasted the money. We’d just spent it.

So, we’ll be moving on with somewhat more urgency to the next phase of Figuring Out the Finances – Figuring Out the Budget.  Scottdid a great job at the beginning of the year putting together a budget we thought allowed us to save ahead for all our big expenses, donate to causes we care about, and still not worry about our day-to-day expenses. However, we haven’t done quite as good a job at reviewing that budget regularly. Our excuse has usually been that we didn’t have all our spending information in a place where we could really compare it to the budget. Thanks to part one of Figuring Out the Finances, that excuse is no more.

We’ll be pretty occupied for the next few weeks dealing with some family issues, so I expect that Figuring Out the Budget will drag on for a while. In the meantime, we’ll just hold off on any more big expenses and see how it goes.