Like any good behavior modification program, there are bound to be some bumps in the road and a reversion to bad habits. I'm going to blame the mystery baby I'm currently growing. Once I explain, you'll agree, it's all his/her fault.
Shopping episode number 1: The baby is making me fat, and that necessitated the purchase of some maternity clothes. Luckily I had budgeted for this expense, and managed to purchase necessary items that I can actually still wear long after the baby is born. Thank goodness for the forgiving cuts of women's fashion right now.
Shopping episode number 2: The incredibly expensive baby stroller we had decided to splurge on went on a crazy sale, so we had to go ahead and buy it. We saved about $125 by opting to buy it now. Again, that expense was budgeted, so no harm no foul.
All good so far, right? Yeah, maybe not.
Shopping episode number 3: My husband and I work from home frequently, and have separate offices set up for this purpose. Unfortunately, one of those offices needed to go away to accommodate the baby. We decided it was a great time to upgrade our office furniture for the new arrangement. For future reference, the word "upgrade" should be a clear sign that what you're doing is not necessary. We picked out some new bookcases and a desk (that we love, but that really weren't necessary in the grand scheme of things).
At this point, our shopping urges had been fully awakened.
Shopping episode number 4: Remember that vacation we had planned and paid for already? Yeah, pregnancy ruins everything. At the last minute, my doctor wouldn't release me to take the cruise we had booked to the Bahamas. Zika virus be damned, I still wanted to go, and we were way too late to get a refund. But cooler heads prevailed and we decided to cancel it. We got some money back in cash and the rest in the form of a credit towards a future cruise - not exactly an ideal situation since we had non-refundable flights booked a week apart leaving out of Charleston, SC. We decided to turn lemons into lemonade and ended up booking additional hotel accommodations in Myrtle Beach for the week of our cruise. The only downside is that instead of eating amazing food free of charge, we would now have to spend a lot of extra money just to eat every day. In the end we decided to just enjoy ourselves. This was our babymoon after all, and I'm happy to say that we had a great time (even if we spent a little more money than we had planned).
Shopping episode number 5: Being in Myrtle Beach for the week made it hard not to shop since we had to fill our days somehow. We both ended up buying a few non-budgeted items that we will really enjoy but were totally unnecessary. Oh well, you only live once.
Now that we're back home, I'm eager to get back on track with our spending fast. I guess the lesson here is that when you fall off that wagon, you have to get back up, pay off your credit card, and get back on track. I am happy to report that the other pieces of our budget have been really solid. We seem to have our food spending under control (even though I know we'll fight this battle continually), I was able to replace another expensive skincare product with a $6 Aveeno brand find, and we were able to deposit an extra $97 just from rolling our spare change.
So how did we do...
For April, we were able to pay an extra $1591.64 on the mortgage! We did even better for May, paying an extra $1975.10 on the mortgage!
Even with our shopping binges, we still managed to make good progress on our financial goals. Since we started working towards total debt-free living, we've paid off over $5,000! Based on our current mortgage, that's the equivalent of about a full year's worth of payments. I'm excited by our progress and can't wait to see how the summer goes!
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