Financially, today has been a great day.  We spent a little more than we’d like to admit, but we also had some great timing on incoming money we weren’t expecting.  I also had a slight miscalculation in the budget for Mrs. DebtBeater’s income.

Today’s Progress:

• Earned - $147.56
• Spent - $113.48 (baby pictures, dept. store payment, groceries)
• Debt Reduced - maybe $10 on the store card

Ok, the earnings were double what we were expecting.  Apparently my wife had worked more hours than she realized since going back to work last month.  That and she didn’t get paid two weeks ago because of some time-keeping glitch on her hours they had to fix.  Also, we originally calculated $75 every two weeks of income when she’s really going to be pulling in that amount about every ONE week.  We’ll round down to account for the variance in her schedule.  The extra we can apply toward unexpected expenses or something.

The spending part…yeah that wasn’t supposed to be so high.  I totally forgot to account for the 3-month baby pictures we had lined up for our youngest.  (We do milestone pictures for all of our kids and make them our gifts to other family members for Christmas & birthdays.  It turns out to be more personal and less expensive than figuring gifts for everyone.)  So it was nice to have the surprise income, but a lot of it was eaten up by the pictures.  They’re so cute though! 

Another thing that really helped the budget (I’ve updated it again to reflect all these changes) is another $200+ in medical reimbursement statements that came in the mail today.  I’ll submit those before the next pay-period is over and that almost completely eliminates all the negative bank balances in the budget for the rest of the year!!!  There’s only one more the last weeks of October where we’re under by about $20.  Surely we can come up with some eBay sales by then to make up for it or some extra pay from the wife’s job.

Stay tuned!  We’re going to do our best to bump ourselves up just a little more so we can get rid of all the red numbers in our bank balances for the rest of the year!