Car Service = Yesterday’s car service was $321.20 - it included the normal service and a change in fan belt.

Increase in Income = DH got an increase but only CPI rate, not surprising really, income here have mainly stagnated in the last few years.

Salary Sacrifice = We’ve decided to increase DH’s Super contribution to hopefully decrease his tax. He is salary sacrificing few hundred dollars per month. Now that the house is paid off this makes a lot of sense for us.

Garden = I’m still getting a lot of swiss chard, I even gave some away to a couple of friends. I’ve been trying out different dishes with it. The other night I made crust less quiche with it. It was very good. A lot of seedlings I planted couple of weekends ago are now coming through. I’m just hoping we get a bit more rain this summer.

Grocery – So far this month we spent $40.86

Gas Bill - $94.47 for the latest bi-monthly bill

TASMANIA TRIP – As I mentioned in my last post we made changes to our holiday plan again. We were going to go away for a week but the weather over there were still chilly that we just decided to go for 2 nights/3 days. I’m still trying to recover from this cough that I got and it keeps coming back when the weather is cold. So we’ve already have come back home. DH didn’t bother changing his holiday taken off from work so it has been good having him home. The weather is supposed to be really good this weekend so we might go camping somewhere near home, just for a night. The costs run down of our trip - FLIGHTS that we bought last month was for $436.00. ACCOMODATION was free because we stayed at my brother’s future father in-laws house. My brother place is only a 1 bedroom cabin. We did however bought a $46 bottle of wine as a thank you gift for letting us stay at their place. TRANSPORTATION cost was for $45 taxi ride to the airport, my brother couldn’t drop us off he had to go to work. FOOD and OTHER cost us $217.20, we visited a small town where the oldest bridge in Australia was built by the convicts and a winery nearby, basically we drunk a lot and ate a lot. TOTAL at the end was $744.20.

TAX – I forgot to talk about our tax refund we got last week. All up it was almost break-even. I got $657.73 refund while DH had to pay $83.10 and then we had to pay accountant fee for $550 so in the end we only got $24.63.

DONATION – We donated $400 the other day.

$100 EFTPOS Card – Apparently when we change our health insurance after 60 days or something they give you $100 EFTPOS card. I’m thinking of using this for Christmas.

Horse Racing – The other day was a public holiday here because of spring horse racing. We and a couple of friends decided to have lunch at a pub and watched the race there. We had a bet amongst ourselves. I won the $20 pot. Lunch and grog was $74.00

There is a reason why I don't like talking/writing about things until they actually happens. I don't like jinxing myself. Last post, I wrote about getting our tax refund soon, well good news is that it is coming very soon; we just got the papers to sign. The bad news is it is a lot less than I anticipated. I based my estimated amount from the past which has been very consistent until now. It looks like we will only get around $1,200 after accountant fee. It seems that we had to pay a bit on Capital Gains Tax. It is good that we are making a bit on our trading to now have to pay CGT but it sucks that we are not getting much back.


So we will mostly like be about 1 grand short to getting $20K mortgage by my birthday next month. I was really looking forward to get to that amount. It would have been a good time to celebrate it. In the scheme of things it is really not that big deal but I have become very obsess about it. It has been few months now since we put any extra payment into the mortgage and I just want my fix. It can be addictive paying down debt, or maybe it is just me being weird. And I get very excited (high) when it reaches a significant amount. Right now I feel like just taking some money out of that savings to get there. I don't think DH would be too keen though. Patience is never my best quality.


Health Insurance-
Just got notice for an increase in our health insurance, it happens every year and it always starts 1st of April. It is an April fool's joke that the insurance company plays on everyone. This time it is going up $12.20 per month (about 5%). It will now be $236.84 per month. I'm just glad it is not as bad as last year, that one was a stinker of a joke.


Special K-
One of the positive things about DH catching the train to/from work is he gets a lot of free samples at the train stations. One of the best one he got last year was Chapsticks, he ended up getting 5. I am still using them until now. Yesterday he came home with a box of Special K Biscuit Moments – blueberry flavour. It is very nice but my goodness it is so sweet, it is like eating sugar cubes. So not for me, not that we ever buy those stuff anyway.

I didn’t think it would come for another week or so, definitely wasn’t expecting it today. For both of us it added to just over $3,300, then we will be paying the accountant $440. We will have to get to the bank tomorrow morning to deposit the cheques because the bank is only open until 1pm on Saturdays.

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Did not have salad last night but had lots of roasted vegetables to go with the roasted chicken. Half way through cooking the roast chicken I had a craving for Japanese food so I made some tempura (using carrots, zucchini and mushrooms). It helped with the craving.
Tonight we will be watching our football team so we will be having meat pie (store bought) and sausage rolls (free from mum’s friend). I will make some rocket salad to go with it. I think DH is getting some snacks to have for the game. It’s a big deal game so we are both looking forward to it.

Tomorrow we are going to a friend’s housewarming party for lunch. She will be making the mains but have asked us to bring other stuff I elected to bring some SALAD!

Tomorrow is payday!!!

Also tax refund has arrived, DH already cashed in his cheque the other day. I will go to the city tomorrow to do the same. And while I'm in the city DH and I will have our monthly lunch date.

After paying off the accountant fee we got $1841.70. I already decided last month that $1000 will go straight to the mortgage. I'm hoping to put another $1500-2000 on top of that. $500 from the tax refund will go into my trading account. I've decided to do some trading after we get back from our holiday, now that I don't have much to do I should get back to doing that for the rest of the year. The other $340 I'm thinking of put it in the car fund.

So now that we got a new airconditioner we need to get rid of the old one. It will require a bit of work, bricking in the hole outside and patching the wall, which will need plastering and painting.

I think this might be something we can do ourselves when DH's arm feel better. I did get someone in today to get a quote and it will cost $760 (excluding painting). The only thing that I'm not confidient with is the brickwork, but this might be a little project to start learning. If we did do this ourself, I think we could do it for less than $100. The only thing we really need is mortar. We got everything else, we got plenty of spare bricks, plasterboard, tools, etc. But of course, it will take us probably a whole weekend to do it.

Another option we got is to just put a small window in the hole and let some light into the dark side of the room. But I'm not sure how it will look and affect the tv since we do like watching the tv in that dark part of the room.

Has any one ever had to get deal with those old airconditioner? What did you do?

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Finally received the papers for our tax refund to sign and send to the tax office. This is a refund for 2009-10 financial year. Believe it or not we are actually getting better at this. We are normally always 3 years behind on filling out our tax. And even better we are almost finish with the 2010-11, just waiting on a couple more items.

We will get $1800 after accountant fees. I don't think we will actually get the cash until next month. I'm already thinking of putting $1000 into the mortgage. For the rest I will decide later.

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I'm hoping for today to be a NSD

Yesterday I blogged about needing more cash/cash flow in the next month or so to pay for trades people that we will need to hire. I was actually thinking of withdrawing money out of my bankwest account (which is the EF accout) or out or the redraw account. I almost did it too especially after I received our AMEX bill of over $2300, the cost of the new fridge that we got last month is in it now. I was really hoping that I didn't need to, I talked to DH about it we both decided to wait until mid next month the AMEX is due to withdraw the money out. He thinks we might not need to withdraw any money out since he will get paid next Friday. And if still short of cash we then withdraw some from those accounts.

Well today we just happened to received our tax refund (for 2009/10),2 cheques 1 in my name and the other under DH, in total just a bit over $2,900. I called DH right away and not even an hour later we were in the bank near DH's work depositing in the cheques. They say it might take few days for it to clear. I knew that and that is why I was really keen to cash it in right away because tomorrow is public holiday here and will most likely have tradies coming on Thurs/Fri, so I really didn't want to wait until Sat to deposit it into the bank. I can now relax about the cash flow shortage issue. Sometimes things just workout.

After the bank, DH and I decided to have lunch out together again. This was not plan. It was a lot nicer than Taco Bill though. We had Thai where they had their lunch specials for $10.50 a meal including drinks. I had chicken satay and rice with coke and DH had red curry and rice with a glass of red wine. DH will have to bring back his packed lunch home again tonight, which means I don't need to cook dinner tonight. Eventhough it was plan and we now only got about $4 in the entertainment/eating out money, we were glad we went out for lunch today to make up for last week's lunch date.

We didn't need a new tyre after all, they just had to plug the hole. It only cost $25 in total. So now it's as good as new, according to the repairer guy. It should be our tyre are pretty new, not even two years old.

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DH just got his tax return form, he should be getting $2,000. This is great news, we didn't expect anything. The most maybe couple hundred dollars. Our tax system is a lot diffent to the US, we don't do the witholding thing. Most of these money will go towards funding the household fund. Just in time really because we need a lot of work done around the house. Our dishwasher will definitely need replacing soon, I'm hoping not until next year. We also need some electrical work done. The front garden could also do some work. Oh man the list could go on. Really 2 grand is not enough for what we need done to the house. We are just prioritizing at the moment. Important things will have to come first.

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I finally bought some shares today, I've been waiting to get in for 2 weeks now. Today it finally hit my price. There's another stock that I want to get, just waiting for my right price.



That's all folks!

The soon to be new cafe near work offered free coffee to everyone in our building. The place is actually not opening for another week, but they are trying out their new coffee machine and wanted to get feedback on there coffee. It was very nice.

Did some shopping for gifts today, everyone here is having a sale at the moment because of end of financial year.

Also today I got my payment summary from work, which what we need to file for our tax. I just need to get my other financial information together this weekend and hopefully next week I should be able to send the info to my accountant. I should be getting over $1,000 back. Hopefully, I can get it by mid-next month.