It has been a busy few weeks with birthdays and work and car stuff, but I have not forgotten about the little 99kby2001 blog in blog-land. I feel as if I’ve left a couple things hanging that I should probably finish up.

Our power bill came in at $350. $100 lower, but still not fabulous. It is not as high on my radar now, but I think we may call our power company and have someone come do an energy audit. I wonder if our (faux wood 2″ slatted) blinds are not as good at holding heat in/out as I think they are. I am happy that it wasn’t another $450 bill though. Very happy.

We received our escrow refund check, and promptly replaced the clutch in my SUV. It was in dire need. It was even starting to STINK. My husband drove it one weekend on an errand that needed a bigger car this his sportymobile, and the first words out of his mouth were, “We’re replacing that clutch MONDAY.” It’s amusing to think that at the beginning of this year, I might be able to wait until the end of summer to have this done. My husband’s car is getting new tires this weekend. Nice to get these things out of the way with “earmarked” money.

The april budget. We tweaked and twokked and twakked and it is generally working now. Part of the problem is that when I enter in future paychecks for estimating purposes, I always enter them low. If I usually am paid 1,792, I will just enter 1700. Multiply that by 4 paychecks, and the “estimate” is off by a decent chunk of change.

Our taxes are done. Luckily not the $5k tax bill I was dreading, but we do owe $3600. We will be getting $1,000 back from our state, which will be nice (and be directed straight to debt, when it comes in!) To have our taxes prepared for us, it cost us $360. I am a little uncertain it was worth it, but my husband has pointed out that it would have taken me HOURS and HOURS to do it myself. We have a freelance business and a partnership to figure in. Also, our last year’s return was lost, the hard drive it was on crashed, and we had to get copies of our tax transcripts to recreate those, which probably inflated the preparer’s cost somewhat. Hopefully next year it won’t be that much. All in all, especially with the missing returns from last year, it really was worth $360 to just not worry about it! AT ALL!

So, with that computed, we are free to deal with the bonus my husbad received at the beginning of this month. As you recall, we were just letting it sit until the taxes had been done, as we were unsure of what we would owe.

So, on to the bonus. First of all, for some reason I had it in my mind that it would be around $12k. That wasn’t even what we got last year (~$10K), so I got a little nutty in the head there, overestimating.

Second of all, it was lower this year. It is determined partly by employee performance, and partly by company performance, and the company didn’t perform as outstandingly as it did last year (like, last year it met it’s goals by 120%, and this year only 110% or something crazy like that.) So the total bonus amount was about $9k.

So where does it all go?

• $2K of that will stay in our etrade savings account as an emergency fund.
• ~$4k of that goes to tax and tax prep ($360),
• $500 was “blow” money (already spent, and consequently, LOWER than the original $1k we had planned, yay us!), which leaves
• ~$2.5K for debt.

So, I am currently moving money around, waiting for it to clear, and then I’ll send off the tax returns and pay a big chunk on our debt. That will feel GOOD.

I have more to share, but I think I’ll wait and post it tomorrow. So tune in tomorrow for how we are going to try to get out of paying interest!

Related Posts:

• April 15, 2008 -- The First Hit To The Emergency Fund! (0)
• February 27, 2008 -- Still antsy! This time about POWER. (1)
• February 16, 2008 -- tax setback? maybe… planning just in case (3)