I was dreading the final budget tally for May because I knew we’d done a lot more driving to visit family (graduation, Mother’s day, another graduation) and a lot more eating out with friends than we’d planned. Or rather, we’d done more than I thought we’d planned. As it turned out, I’d planned for twice as much gas spending as usual.
The month wasn’t entirely rosy, but it ended on a good note!
Things I Let Slide
1) Clothing. On the plus side, Micah has completely refreshed his casual wardrobe with 2 pairs of new jeans and 5 new t-shirts. On the minus side, I wasn’t expecting him to do the whole thing this month (though he made great purchases) and hadn’t budgeted enough. We took some money from the Misc. budget for it and that worked.
2) Recreation. We ate out too much. We should have either shifted the budget to allow for it, turned down offers, or eaten less expensive meals (to be fair, my menu was out-of-date about whether or not one meal was 1/2 off, but I didn’t want to make a scene since another sign was correct). Not the end of the world, we shifted snowflakes, but it was annoying.
3) (this one is something that’ll have an effect on the next month) I lost my SmarTrip card. For those of you who don’t live in DC, this is a card which stores my metro fare money. It makes commuting much easier. Unfortunately, I didn’t get it replaced (used Micah’s) until it was too late in the month to get my Smart Benefits changed at work.
This means that the pre-tax money I was supposed to get from my employer is only available to my old card. It’ll probably end up in limbo and revert to the program. Program people–not very flexible, I don’t know if that’s my end or Metro’s end. Either way, that means I have to budget more for transportation in June.
Big Win
We were able to put $2200 in snowflakes towards Micah’s student loans. This follows in $2000 in April and $1800 in March. WIN!
This summer, we won’t have Micah’s income to help out with it–just what I earn from my job and from blogging/consulting. We also have 2 trips. I don’t expect to be able to put that much away, it’s part of budgeting with a teacher in the family. Micah was thinking of teaching this summer, but there aren’t enough courses where he normally teaches. We decided against looking elsewhere so he can buckle down on the dissertation and finish it before fall semester.
Here’s to a frugal-er June!
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RE: SmarTrip
Just keep calling your benefits people. Metro can transfer your old funds to the new card, and the program people generally insist on you pulling the money during the month time frame or ‘loosing it’, but if you call and explain the situation (and possibly make a fuss) they should be able to get the money onto your new card.
Major bummer about the SmarTrip. Metro makes everything a pain. I hope Amanda’s advice works!
Finish the dissertation by fall? That would be awesome! Well worth some penny-pinching over the summer. 🙂
Funny about Money’s last blog post: Buying a car? Watch out for rips
@Amanda Thanks for the encouragement. Perhaps I’ll go to their actual office tomorrow and see what I can do.
@meinmillions At least I was able to transfer off the balance I had at the time. But since I was unable to redeem the money reserved for that card….bleh.
@Funny WELL worth it! I realized recently that Micah’s been writing his dissertation for the entire 23 months we’ve been married! 😮 It’s him, me, and it. I don’t resent it, but I won’t miss it!
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