I took advantage of free hikes this week.
Happy Friday! This weekend is my last weekend before I head back to the country for several weeks for work, so I plan to enjoy it to it’s fullest. Here’s the good, the bad and the ugly of my week:
Big Wins This Week
My Tax Return
My tax return got assessed, yay! It’ll be around $1,250, deposited into my account on April 13th. Some of that will go towards paying my husband’s outstanding tax bill from last year, and the rest will be going to my house down payment fund. I’ll write a full report on it once the money hits my account.
Working Out
I’ve also been working out! My fitness level goes in spurts. I have strings of good days and bad days, and I’m sad to say I’ve been in a real rut with working out since I took my trip to France at the beginning of December. I seem to have turned a corner though because this week I’ve worked out every single day. Now I just need a new pair of running shoes and all of this damn snow to melt, and I’ll be back on track.
Big Losses This Week
Spending Money: A Barbecue
We bought a barbecue. Buying things usually feels more like a win than a loss, but since it negatively affects my net worth, I’ll put it under the loss section. We inherited our last barbecue from a roommate more than five years ago, and it was old then. It provided us with delicious barbecue goodness over the years but was slowly disintegrating into dust. It was in such bad shape that we didn’t even bring it with us when we moved.
I knew it was time to replace it so I watched sales flyers like a hawk until I found one that I think will last us a long time. It was a little more expensive than the bottom-of-the-barrel $100 barbecue, but it has a five-year warranty so I’m hoping the cost-per-use will even out.
Spending Money: Food & Entertainment
Finally, this is the first week that lifestyle inflation is creeping into my budget. Now that my husband is bringing in almost as much cash as I am every week, he has a greater say in how I allocate money. One of the requests he made was to increase our food and entertainment budget.
More money for food and entertainment seemed pretty reasonable since I haven’t adjusted that amount since 2012. I also agreed with him, because we now live in a city with more restaurants than we could ever try, and about ten craft breweries within a 10-minute drive. So I increased it by about 15%. That’s money that now isn’t going to savings, but I’m ok with it. My husband and I both have goals for our money and different values, so we need to compromise.
Recommended Reading and Listening
I’ve been going through some old blog posts recently, cleaning up categories and tags, and I noticed all of my old “Link Love” blog posts. It’s where I would share a bunch of posts I enjoyed from around the blog world and acknowledged any social shares that were kind to me that week.
I’m not going to go back to that, but I thought I might occasionally mention a blog post or two that particularly resonated with me. This week I found one over at Blonde on a Budget that was particularly good. It was about working at home and inspired Wednesday’s blog post about Good Days and Bad Days.
The second one was a tirade written by Bridget from Money After Graduation about people who put off paying off debt. If you’ve ever felt unmotivated about your debt, that blog post might be the kick in the butt you need to get moving.
Tell me about your big wins and losses this week, I want to know!