There are two things that inevitably seem to happen when you go from being flat broke to having disposable income. The first is that all the things you have been putting off paying are now getting paid. I am including things needing repair/ replacing in this too because they wouldn’t be breaking if you had the money earlier to do the minor repairs on them before.
For us this means paying all the medical bills for having the new baby on top of all the medical bills we owe from having baby girl, student loans, Replacing the jeep, Getting me a car, Paying for a doula for this birth, and all the smaller random things we owe that need to be paid. We had big plans for our tax return but, even though we were making payments on them, C’s student loans decided to take half of that. At least those are paid off now though. Then we had enough left over to finish paying what we owe for medical stuff, except the jeep broke and we had to spend half of that on getting a new car for C. Such is life.
The second thing that happens though is the really bad thing. It’s the sudden relief that you aren’t struggling like you were so you can afford to splurge. That’s ok except $20 here, $30 there, $50 somewhere else, all of a sudden turns into “holy crap we just spent half of our phone payment” which is not ok. We try to have budget weekly, sometimes even bi-weekly budget talks but for some reason that doesn’t seem to help. I think the next step is going to have to be giving ourselves an allowance. Something like each of us having a $20 splurge allowance every 2 weeks, or putting aside entertainment money. Having a grocery money envelope, something like that to keep us from saying “oh there is $200 in the account right now, I’m cool to buy this thing, without considering that 1) we have a bill due or 2) we need to be putting aside every spare dollar for this build.
Regardless, The budget we had worked out for march is completely shot to hell. We still owe over $1000 in medical bills which we aren’t going to have paid off before the baby is born, all of our other stuff we were going to pay off is now pushed back at least another month or two. The worst part is that we hve nothing in savings to start building the house with. I’m just a bit stressed out about all this. The baby is due in a few weeks, we are moving, almost nothing is packed because we have no boxes and I have no transportation to get any, I have no energy to clean the house, and of the long list of things that have to get done in march we have completed a grande total of 0. That is non of them. I am a bit stressed. Just a little. Everything on that list has to be completed by the time we move, at the end of this month, on top of all the things that I have to add in for April. I hate end of the month crap, and I especially hate money.
I hate it, too