July 15, 2007 - 12:19 AM.

Money on the visor

Ok here's what budgeting can do for you.

My husband does NOT like the budgeting portion of our lives right now. He likes to feel like he is able to run out and do whatever he likes, buy whatever he wants, at a moment's notice without thinking about it, as if we were rich. He doesn't actually do this, and didn't really do it even when we were double-income-no-kid, but he fancies that he did and that now we can't and life is difficult, particularly on the weekends which is the only time such activity can conceivably take place now anyway.

So today I finish up with my clients, he takes the babe out to my folks' house for some Day-In-The-Country heat relief, and he picks me up from work wanting to go out to lunch. He remembered that we might have a little money left on a restaurant gift card, and decides to pull out a stack of cards and things he has up on his visor organizer. And lo, what budget busters did appear therefrom! To wit:

* An Anthony's Seafood giftcard, $23 left on it from the original $50 - this card was given to us the month our 2 1/2-year-old was born!

* Two Fred Meyer gift card remnants, totalling $63 - original cards so old we don't remember when we got them

* A gift card from a children's consignment shop, earned when I traded the owner a massage session, $42 remaining of original $65

* A smoothie-place punchcard, full, entitling us to a free large smoothie (we love those things and even better, so does the baby)

* Ten bucks at the local organic-only grocer, also earned in trade some time back

* Two coffee-hut punch cards, each also full, therefore equalling two free fancy coffees

* His hardware-store gift card (birthday gift from his folks), $78 remaining of original $100 (!!)

* Target gift card also from baby's birth, $16 remaining

* A gift certificate for a double-scoop cone at the local icecream parlor, the place that makes all its own creams in essential-oil flavors like cardamom, rosewater, black pepper - in addition to the great standards like mint chip and rocky road. This GC I got for recording my public-transportation trips online.

So let's tally up, shall we? That's one expensive lunch date (I had Cobb salad, he had Kobe beef kabob with corn salad - all gluten free), 2 mochas, a load of clothes/toys/books for the child, groceries, housewares, home improvement/building, an icecream that will feed all 3 of us, and a family-size smoothie. SITTING AROUND in our car. For a total unspent value of $248. Two hundred and forty-eight dollars!

I have got to get in the budgeting mood more often.

J. was so excited that when we got home from lunch, he whirlwind-cleaned the whole dining area of our big room, set up all his grandfather's hand-polished rocks on a shelf, and started looking forward to football season. Life is sweet. (And when both your mothers are trying to move out from under cancer, it is lovely to find life sweet.)

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