Mm wins and losses for sept

[chpmnk1015]

I'll start.

L: another crazy gas bill for pool heat. It's closed now. It was less than last years same month though

L: a lot of entertaining so bigger grocery bill

W: did a few k ibond for each kid and me

W: hit another goal for the year so only have 1 more goal by end of dec; on track to hit

W: just signed up for 401k as eligible starting Nov 1. Will miss that extra money in my paycheck though because it's been helping w goals

[aspentosh]

Loss: we paid 2x what we were expecting to on a car rental for our anniversary trip. Our flight got delayed and the place we were going to pickup closed at 12p on Saturdays... Thankfully we were still able to get a car though!

Loss (sorta): we are finishing our garage and still have no idea what the final cost will be. We cash flow these smaller projects but we may need to take money out of savings this time... It'll be worth it for H though because our garage won't go below freezing this winter and his workouts will be more enjoyable.

Win: food for our anniversary trip wasn't bad because we only ate out twice (once was a tiny breakfast place so it was like $30, lol). The rest was our initial grocery trip.

Win: just calculated when we'll fully fund H's 401k and it looks like we'll have 3-4 paychecks without that coming out. Good timing for EOY gifts.

[Susie]

Unexpected win:  I submitted my application for a direct consolidation loan for my FFEL student loans around 10:30pm on 9/28.  On 9/29, they announced that applications had to be submitted before 9/29.  I made it by like 1.5 hour.  Maybe there will be a path created in the future for FFEL loan forgiveness (THERE SHOULD BE), but at present this is a necessary step toward the Biden-Harris SL forgiveness opportunity that I very nearly unknowingly missed.  In the meantime, my underlying FFEL loans are now in administrative forbearance, so I can spend those monthly SL payments toward other SLs that have higher rates.

Maybe win?:  I bought $10k in I bonds.  I guess we'll see in the coming years whether that was really a win.

Loss:  Our dog needed surgery to remove some cysts.  It's not a big deal $-wise, but it was a cost.  She got her stitches out yesterday and is doing fine, so all is well.

[sometimesrunner]

L: My car is in the shop getting a new engine. Estimated cost is $7k. Barffff.

W: I should be getting an escrow refund check on our house this month. We got one last month on our commercial property, but this one should be bigger.

W: I finally bought ibonds in H's name last month. I did mine a few months ago.

[midwestmama]

Mixed: We sold my vehicle private party, so 3k more than we would've gotten on trade, but have to rent a vehicle for about 3 weeks which ended up being $800, which is more than we expected it would be. I'm hoping we can pick up my new car a few days before the rental end date and get a little money back.

aspentosh, your comment about 401k made me remember that DH will hit the SS tax limit sometime next month, so that is an upcoming win for us. I'm always glad to have a little extra money per check at the end of the year.

[ellipses84]

No major wins or losses in September. All of our personal and business taxes from the last 2 years finally got sorted out by the IRS so I’m glad that’s resolved without any financial impact either way.

I drove to LA for a long bday weekend but it was very affordable. I wanted to do stuff I’d never done before and almost all of it was free! DH gets a huge work discount for a hotel in Beverly Hills, but we had to valet park and I think parking ended up being our biggest expense. We ate good food but it wasn’t fancy for my picky family.

[aspentosh]

Oct 4, 2022 13:49:28 GMT -5 aspentosh said:

Loss: we paid 2x what we were expecting to on a car rental for our anniversary trip. Our flight got delayed and the place we were going to pickup closed at 12p on Saturdays... Thankfully we were still able to get a car though!

Loss (sorta): we are finishing our garage and still have no idea what the final cost will be. We cash flow these smaller projects but we may need to take money out of savings this time... It'll be worth it for H though because our garage won't go below freezing this winter and his workouts will be more enjoyable.

Win: food for our anniversary trip wasn't bad because we only ate out twice (once was a tiny breakfast place so it was like $30, lol). The rest was our initial grocery trip.

Win: just calculated when we'll fully fund H's 401k and it looks like we'll have 3-4 paychecks without that coming out. Good timing for EOY gifts.

Quoting myself to update. We spent $1000 on wire yesterday because we are proactively running H's future EV charging station. Hopefully he'll get his truck in the next 6 months and since the walls were already open and we had an electrician here it made sense. But holy hell that wire is expensive!

[wildrice]

Win: We stayed on budget for once! Or maybe went around $100 over. We have a large amount of padding in our budget that is designated for savings, but with various things over the summer it's been months since anything went into it. I'm using that money to make an extra payment toward my H's SLs to try to pay off as much as possible while it's still 0% interest. I hope to do that again this month. There is no good reason not to unless something unexpected comes up.

Loss: I actually just read the letter yesterday, but it was sent in Sept so I'll count it. Somehow our escrow account has a shortfall and so our payment is going up $240 a month for the next year. I am curious what it will be after that. We refinanced last year and now I'm feeling a little mislead that the monthly payment we were quoted isn't high enough. Also I think our property taxes did go up a few hundred dollars (probably due to our house value going up with this housing boom) so it might not be entirely the mortgage company's fault, but we were short like $1500 so I'm not sure what happened.

[midwestmama]

wildrice, we also have an estimated escrow shortfall (around $600 for the year). I'm 99% sure it's due to taxes because our home's taxable value increased. I miss the days of escrow overages and getting a small reimbursement check.

[wildrice]

Oct 6, 2022 9:53:50 GMT -5 midwestmama said:

wildrice , we also have an estimated escrow shortfall (around $600 for the year). I'm 99% sure it's due to taxes because our home's taxable value increased. I miss the days of escrow overages and getting a small reimbursement check.

So annoying! Yay for home value increasing, but we're not  moving anytime soon so all that does is negatively impact our budget!

[quesyrah]

Loss: we spent a little over $5K installing ductless mini split AC in the bedrooms. They didn’t work and we ended up having to spend another $700 to stay in a hotel to ride out the heat wave (it was 105-106 and not cooling down overnight so our bedrooms were still 96 degrees at night). The company gave us the runaround until I called them out on Twitter. The service department decided we had gotten a condenser unit with a faulty control panel. They shipped us a new condenser unit and now it works great!

Win: we don’t have to sleep in hot bedrooms draped in wet cooling towels anymore! And DH won an award at work that came with a small bonus.

[brooke77]

Wins: We closed on the sale of our home! No more double expenses (rent/mortgage, electricity and gas bills x2).

Losses: I bought tickets to a wine festival and couldn’t attend last minute. About a $200 loss, plus I was really looking forward to going!

ETA: I just remembered another win! I bought a cold brew coffee maker (basically just a jug with a filter to put in ground coffee beans) which has drastically reduced my Starbucks consumption!

[sadlebred]

September was a fairly neutral month.

Wins: Donated more money towards my charity giving this year.

Losses: My escrow is going to go up a lot since property taxes are way up. I'll find out in Jan. how much. My guess is about $250. Not sure where that will come from in the budget.

[chpmnk1015]

L. 400 at BJs last night.. how did that even happen! But, I guess I stocked up on some stuff I haven't in a while and I had like 30 in coupons

[dutchgirl678]

Unexpected win: We got a refund for $1700 from our travel insurance. This summer we traveled to the Netherlands and Greece and we weren't allowed to board our plane from Greece to the Netherlands because DH was sick (food poisoning) that morning. I had to rebook flights for 4 people and find a hotel/apartment for two days. We also had an apartment booked in the Hague for 4 days which we were only able to use for 2 days. We have year-round travel insurance and after sending in the receipts and getting an email from the airline with a partial refund (taxes only) as evidence that we had missed our flight due to illness, we got a check in the mail. It'll go straight into savings towards our down payment for the EV we should get soon.

[gt7301b]

DH got a raise in Sept.

Technically we will see this in October, but we got notification in Sept - I got an unexpected cost of living raise this month, first ever, we usually just get "merit" raises.