Wow. July is finally upon us. For months now, we’ve been making plans for various exciting events this month. For starters, it’s our daughter’s 5th birthday this month. Instead of spending a ton of money on a huge party, we have decided to take a little bit more reserved approach. We have invited just a couple of our daughter’s friends and their families out to the lake for a weekend. One family will spend the night, and the other will just be out for the day. I think we’ll have a great time and keeping it smaller seems much more manageable.
We are also headed to Montana this month to visit family and attend my cousin’s wedding. We are really looking forward to this trip and are excited to see everyone there. Family will be coming in from multiple cities in the US so it should be a wonderful time to catch up. We have rented a car and will be splitting gas and the cost of the rental three ways so it’s going to be quite affordable. We still have the hotel expense and food etc, but we expect the total cost of the trip will be just under $1000. Believe me, it could be a LOT worse. If we had decided to fly the cost would have easily doubled.
This coming weekend we’ll be enjoying friends and family out at the lake. There is a large fireworks show planned and we’ll also be having a large community picnic at the community park. I think it’s going to be great!
On a somewhat unrelated note, I took a little time this weekend to look at all the major expenditures we have coming up. We have a few significant expenses in the next couple months. There is some much needed car maintenance in our future, a large community assessment for the water system at our lake house community, the trip to Montana, annual taxes for our lake house, and finally, we owe a couple thousand more to my friend that helped build our lake house.
To offset some of these expenses we also have some extra money coming in over the next couple months that will mitigate most of these. We still haven’t received our stimulus check which should be about $1500. Additionally we also expect a bonus from my company and an extra paycheck in the next few months. To get a good idea of the impacts to our budget I built a simple spreadsheet to see how the expenses vs the extra income stack up. I initially thought that all these things would be hitting at once, but realized that they are fairly well spread out through the rest of the year so they shouldn’t be too much of an issue.
Sounds like you are definitely getting your money’s worth out of the lake house– hope you get to relax and enjoy it on your own sometimes too, without having to play host!
Sounds like a busy (but fun) month! When I saw your note about your spreadsheet, I had to wonder what you use as a regular financial tool. I upgraded to the latest version of Quicken not long ago, and I’ve become addicted to the feature that lets you see all income & expenses in a calendar format (via the Home tab). Once you have all of your recurring paychecks & bills automatically scheduled you can then schedule in irregular income & expenses as one time events to see how they’ll affect your cashflow on any given day. It took a lot of tweaking to get it all working just right, but now that I have it behaving the way I want it to, I have to say that it’s the best financial tool I’ve ever used.
I have tried using MS Money in the past but really didn’t like it. It took a lot of work to try to balance all the time and I just found it not to be all that enjoyable.
I built a couple spreadsheets that I use for all of our finances. It incorporates some charts, tables etc.
I just found your blog, love it! A lot of good reading on here :) Adding you to my links.