The Holiday

I took a week-long break from blogging over here, mainly because I wanted the time to reflect, relax, and just not think of new topics and posts..

The unwinding time was good, and now I’m ready to gear back up.  Coming soon, I’ll have an update on the debt, but after looking at our finances last week, I’ve decided that it would be very easy to just slip back into the old pattern of accumulating debt.  Of course, that wouldn’t be a good thing to do, but it would be easy.  The mounting cost of everything, coupled with the fact that my income hasn’t risen along with the increased cost of living, tends to be something of a drag for me.  I had hoped to see some very positive changes, but, in reality, the change was pretty insignificant.

June saw several bills come in from the various doctor/hospital visits I had back in April.  All of them are late, but I was thinking the insurance hadn’t kicked in yet, but apparently it has, so now I’ve got to go through the process of understanding why the insurance says one thing, and the bill says another.  Whatever that amount ends up being, the bank account is going to feel it…

Another thing I noticed is that we went on several trips, in addition to buying new tires for the truck and getting the 30k service done on the car, so we WAY overspent our “Gas/Oil/Maintenance” category last month.  Right now, I’m sitting with a negative balance of $511 in that one.  Its ok, because there are several accounts that offset the negative balance, but at the current rate, it will take over two months to recoup that cost (the tires were about $450 of that, and I wasn’t really expecting it to hit).  As well, I’ve got to get the truck inspected in August, and that one is coming up quick.

According to “My Portfolio” with Bank of America, we came out $164 better last month.  In May, that number was over $1,000.  Hopefully July will be a better month…