Tax Refund Week 2

Good Wednesday Morning All!

Well here we are into Week 2 of the Tax Refund and here’s how the spending went

Bills:

$180.00 – Set Aside for Silver’s 3/17 Payment , total set aside, $360.00

$148.00 – Progress Energy – this will Zero out our balance due for now

$100.00 – Dad for Repayment of the Dec. Progress Energy Payment, Bal. Due $220.00

$115.00 – Cape Fear Public Utility Authority

$232.42 – State Farm, 02/28 Auto-Draft

$50.00 – Gold’s Gym

$2.13 – Etsy.com Seller Fees (YarntoAfghanCreations)

$118.33 – AT&T

Total Paid: $945.88 – OUCH!

Misc. Spending:

Household Spending:

$17.25 – Sunrise Express, Laundry

$175.40 – Wal-Mart, Groceries (Receipt Submitted to Savings Catcher)

$32.57 – Wal-Mart, Groceries (Receipt Submitted to Savings Catcher)

$17.77 – Everybody’s IGA (Groceries)

$10.59 – Harris Teeter (Groceries)

$7.02 – Wal-Mart (Receipt Submitted to Savings Catcher)

$24.56 – Handee Hugo’s (Gas)

$14.86 – Murphy’s (Gas)

Total Household Spending: $300.02

Dining Out:

$58.00 – IHOP (Dinner)

$29.00 – Papa John’s (Dinner)

$5.78 – PCJ

$10.43 – Harris Teeter (Starbucks)

Total Dining Out: $103.21

Entertainment:

$4.26 – Amazon.com (eBooks)

$4.27 – Amazon.com Video on Demand (Hotel Transylvania 2)

 

$3.20 – Amazon.com Video on Demand (Alice in Wonderland)

Total Entertainment: $11.73

Misc. Spending:

$13.34 – Ship & Mail Plus (YarntoAfghanCreations)

$20.25 – HobbyLobby.com (Nephew’s 1st B-Day Gift Supplies)

Total Misc.: $33.59

Grand Total: $448.55

Ok so I am not totally disappointed with this week’s spending breakdown, the worst it seems was household – it appears we’re spending more on groceries as we’re doing the one-off shopping trips for misc. items that weren’t accounted for in the weekly grocery shopping trip – these items aren’t normally purchased.  However, I do have a teenage boy in the house now and that means more food spending for the next several years, as anyone whose been around a teenage boy will tell you they eat like bottomless pits LOL!  And, my son is no exception, seems he’s eating more than ever lately.

Next week I intend to make the payment for the taxes on Silver and then we’ll be done paying bills for now.  That’s the last of them as far as I can see.  Then again you never know.

Still trying to figure out how to make the money in savings work for us – the Apple stock I bought is doing well, we’ve made a small amount of money off of our existing stocks in the last week, so no complaints there.

Well that’ll be enough from me for now!

 

 

Happy New Year! New Year, New Financial Goals, a Fresh Start

 

I hope beyond all hope everyone had a Great Holiday Season! Santa was good to you and yours, and that your New Year Celebrations were everything you hoped they would be!  We spent ours as per usual at home watching Transformers 3 and playing Skip Bo after I did my at home Zumba Workout!

With the New Year comes many thoughts flooding into my head about what I want our finances to look like for 2014, and I can honestly say I have lofty goals and that probably only 10% of them will be met, so here goes, I am posting them here for accountability purposes:

1.  Get Caught up on the Mortgage, we are currently behind once again, owing somewhere around $2,400.00 with another month being due posting 01/15/14…so this is Goal #1.  I haven’t completely figured out yet how we are going to catch up on this – for now I have built into the budget a weekly payment of $225.26 to at least cover the current month.

2.  Get Caught up and PayOff the car loan, we are currently behind once again, owing somewhere around $504.00 with another month being due posting 01/06/14…so again Goal #2 here.  And again I haven’t figured out how to catch up on this until tax time when I plan on using the tax refund to pay the back due balance and then as much as we can towards paying off the loan.  According to my math we owe something like $2,600.00 so I feel this is completely doable! Once the car is paid off we’re going to hold onto it for another year until we receive our refund in 2015 in hopes that without the car payment we can be more consistent with making our mortgage/utility payments.

3.  Get Caught Up on All Utilities! – We are once again behind on both the water and electric bills to the tune of about $400.00, so my ultimate goal here is to pay them off – I have worked again into the budget a weekly allotment to pay once utility something every week until tax time when I can zero them out – on the other side of this however is finding ways to lower said utility bills which may be semi-difficult, we’ll see!

4.  Build an Emergency Fund – Be it the monies we have left over at the end of each week, or we find a way to build with separate savings, this is a Necessity to prevent car repairs coming from our general funds – even if I have to split up what’s left in our checking account two ways every week I will find a way to do this!

5.  Start a Christmas 2014 Savings Fund – This will be for our travel and purchase of gifts for next Christmas! I so did NOT like being home alone this year – while our Christmas was nice & quiet with just the four of us, I still prefer the chaos and family time in Maryland! Call me crazy but that’s the way of it…to do this I have built into the budget each week a small amount of money to deposit into our savings account to help fund this account!

So that is the main list of 2014 Financial Goals – while I’d also love to find a way to fund a small vacation for all four of us, I just don’t see that happening right now – it just isn’t in the books.  I said something a couple of weeks ago that if anyone wanted to nominate us for one the Ellen Show “Surprises” I wouldn’t be offended – ugh I would so love some sort of miracle to come into our lives to help us out here!

So what are your 2014 Financial Goals?

Budget Week Ending 04.13.13…And Some News…

WOW! Another week has gone by, I can’t believe it, though I kind of can…this week went by at a frigging snails pace, with work just dragging and the week just dragging on and on and on…but it finally came to a close and here I am getting ready to embark on another week.  I can’t believe it!

For the news aspect of this post, I am going to share that we FINALLY HAVE A ZERO BALANCE WITH ONE OF OUR UTILITIES!!! This is huge for us as we generally carry a balance month to month and pray each month they don’t cut us off, but I actually made the finally $79.11 payment to Cape Fear Public Utility Authority on Friday – this is until our next bill hits in May, but STILL this is so very exciting for us!!!

Second to that is CitiMortgage and our Re-Structure – I’ll post about this separately as I have a bit of a rant on that status update…

So here’s our budget for the week, we’re in the cycle this year at this time with having to update Rabies vaccines for two of our kitties, Callie and Cinnamon.  So we’re splitting it across two appointments as it’s rather pricey to do them both at the same time.  With a wellness visit, the shot, and the county license we’re looking at $69.00/each…OUCH! Thus the reason only two of our four are registered with the county, remember we have four (4) kitties all together with our Dog, Nixon, who’s due in August for his update and license – but he also has other vaccines we need to get done with him, so that appointment will be rather expensive.  Will need to save for that one 😉

Onto the budget for the week, please enjoy!

$2,557.00	Federal Tax Refund			$606.08	Lara W/E 04/07/13 Salary
$685.00	State Tax Refund			$301.34	Jimmy W/E 04/07/13 Salary
$3,242.00				$907.42
$36.06	Sunoco
$14.08	PetsMart
$35.07	Wal-Mart
$21.76	Wal-Mart
$15.10	PCJ
$8.83	Bath & Body Works
$8.34	Fuzzy Peach
$3.52	Dunkin Donuts
$21.50	Food Lion
$7.60	PCJ
$6.00	Tommy’s
$5.88	Tommy’s
$183.74

First with the breakdown of expenses/budget items line by line – a little more went to Brigades this week because they are offering Softball/Tee Ball to their members for $10.00, Ashley has opted to play Tee Ball while Austin has opted out:

$1,172.59
$20.00	DB Plumbing
$1,152.59
$80.00	Brigades Boys & Girls Club
$1,072.59
$5.00	OT Solutions
$1,067.59
$5.00	CCA, Auto Draft 04/15/13
$1,062.59
$5.00	LCA, Auto-Draft, 04/17/13
$1,057.59
$89.00	APM Int’l, Auto-Draft 04/15/13
$968.59
$79.11	CFPUA
$889.48
$69.00	Needham Animal Hospital
$820.48
$170.00	Groceries
$650.48
$40.00	Gas
$610.48
$25.00	Dinner 04/12
$585.48
$25.00	Cat & Dog Food
$560.48
$25.00	Jimmy’s Money
$535.48
$5.00	Cape Fear Peds
$530.48	Remaining Funds for Bills W/E 04/21/13

And now with the lump sum cash payout – the actual cash req’d was $285.00, but with the ATM dispensing only twenties, I went with $300.00, which was good because we ended up purchasing a rake and some other misc. items that cost about $12.00 at Wal-Mart yesterday so the extra cash came in handy!

$1,172.59
$20.00	DB Plumbing
$1,152.59
$80.00	Brigades Boys & Girls Club
$1,072.59
$5.00	OT Solutions
$1,067.59
$5.00	CCA, Auto Draft 04/15/13
$1,062.59
$5.00	LCA, Auto-Draft, 04/17/13
$1,057.59
$89.00	APM Int’l, Auto-Draft 04/15/13
$968.59
$79.11	CFPUA
$889.48
$69.00	Needham Animal Hospital
$820.48
$300.00	Cash for Week
$520.48
$5.00	Cape Fear Peds
$515.48	Remaining Funds for Bills W/E 04/21/13

That’s it for the week!