Well today is pay day but it wouldn't clear until tomorrow. DH also got paid earlier this week. We now fully funded the tuition fund. And have now achieved all our goals for all our funds this year.

At the end of this month we should have $500-$600 extra money this month. That is even after already putting away savings and paying off a lot of bills. So now we got to decided what to do with the extra money. There are a lot of options of coure. Should we just put the extra money towards savings or should we keep putting more money towards our various funds? Right now I am not all that happy with our EF especially now with all this economic disasters. Also the the car fund is not as much as I want it to be, particulary now that we will probably need to get the brakes replace. And we could always use more in the house fund for all the projects/repairs we need done around here. So I guess starting on next year's goals wouldn't be so bad. And maybe also putting more towards savings.

So I guess that kind of answered my question. It always help to think things out loud. I will of course need to discuss all of these with DH, he might have some other ideas. We will see at the end of the month what we will end up doing.

It's really quiet at work at the moment, so I got time to do some blogging .

Financial wise it has been pretty quiet as well. Since I paid a bunch of bills on the weekend we havent really done much except for getting takeaway on Monday. We spent $12.85 for fish and chips. It was of course bad, it broke our no takeaway streak. We lasted 20 days. I was hoping to last for a month. Oh well, there's something to aim for next time.

Yesterday was a NSD, and I'm also hoping today would be one too (would make it 5 for this month so far). Oh and yesterday I got a free train pass. A nice stranger gave me her pass (she didn't need it anymore), So she saved me almost $5. Thank you, nice lady.

So far this week it has been really cheap. We do have an expensive weekend coming up. We are going out on Saturday night and I'm also going to get some stuff for our vegie garden. It's staring to warm up around here so now is the great time to start getting the garden for spring and summer crops. You just cant bet home grown tomatoes, yummo!

Paid a lot of bills yesterday. Water was really high this month because it included the Annual Parks Charge. That was worth more than $55. The gas was also quite high because of higher winter usage. Can't wait for the weather to start getting warmer, which should cut down our gas usage. So utilities this month is more than $350, I guess they are coming due all at once since we didn't have any last month.

Also paid credit card bills, they weren't too bad.

Later this month our quartely property rate(tax) is due, it has gone up by about $10 for the year. Good news is that the value of our property has also gone up by about $20K.

Oh another good news is that our interest rate has finally gone down (first time for 7 years). Which means about $30 less a month interest on our mortgage.

Well that's all the update I've got for now.

Yesterday's NSD was expected, however today NSD was not planned at all. We were meant to go to Aldi after work today but we got stuck in traffic. We were over an hour late than usual, it would have been already closed if we went. Oh well, we are not that desperate yet and will go Friday night when they are open a little bit later. Because we were running late we also almost got some takeaway (takeout) after work but somehow talked ourselves out of it. You should've have heard our conversation in the car, it was so funny. We we’re both very hungry already. One minute we agreed to get bbq chicken but then we took turned convincing ourselves why we shouldn’t. So in the end we agreed to have some of the leftover minestrone soup I made yesterday with toast. That helped got rid of the hunger pains, and I then cooked something else for main. BTW it has been 16 days since we got takeaway! I like to see how long we can go without buying it. Maybe we can hold out for the whole month. That would be a first for us.

I forgot to mentioned that we had 8 NSD in Aug, so I put in $40 into the New Laptop Fund. I really don't like the name of this fund. So I have decided to put this money into the "Sunny Day Savings" instead. Right now we got $500 in that savings. That will make that a pretty reasonable savings now. There are few options for this money, maybe a new LCD TV (the naughty option but has been a want for a long long time for us), could be added to my trading account (which would be the reasonable option), or I could even add it to the Emergency fund (the boring but grown up option). I think an opportunity will come and I will know then what to do with this money.

Overall, it was a pretty good month:



THE GOOD:
Grocery - the lowest we spent in a month this year.
Utilities - No bills due for this month (unfortunately Sept is going to be a lot more than normal).
Clothing - didn't spend a cent.


THE BAD:
Transportation - not really too bad considering we just filled up the car. Extra usage due to a day trip we took for this month.
Allowances - mine in particular was a bit over.

THE UGLY:
Entertainment - way over!! And it is not going to get any better for Sept either. Oh well. I think I really under estimated this category by a lot.
Medical - an injury that need medical attention. Could not be avoided. It could have been more (almost twice as much) if we didn't have private insurance. I think the rebates we received this year from our health insurance pretty much paid for our premiums for the year.

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FUNDS SNOWBALL (see My Pages):

I've fully funded the Holiday Fund (woohoo!), also managed to put some money in the Tuition fund. The tuition should be funded by the end of this month. We will only need to put in another $800, anymore than that will be too much. So by the end of Sept I will achieved my funds snowball goal, couple of months earlier. I'm gonna need to think of new goals.

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I really need to blog more (even about boring stuff), it tends to help my budget. I might make this as one of my goal for this month.