this wasn't in the plan |but life is still pretty good

If you are visiting from MSN's Smart Spending Blog for the first time, welcome! I hope you'll take a moment to look around. Thanks so much for reading!

photo by Joe Lanman
Just for kicks, I decided to look at our financial state a year ago to compare it to how things are going this year.  I was surprised at how much more money we are bringing in now compared to last November.  And I was a little bit disappointed that we haven't been saving as much money as we potentially could be.  So, of course I started to make excuses.  But I couldn't make these excuses account for much.  Which means, we've slowly started to grow into our new income.

In March, I wrote about how I feared that we'd just absorb The Tall One's raise.   Which is  And in April, I wrote about wiggle room - the fact that since we had some more money coming in each month, we could actually use it.  So, even though we may have gradually eased ourselves into our new salary, it's probably okay.  TTO and I were talking last night about that.  Basically our budget numbers have stayed consistent, but when the chance to buy something pops up we usually take it.  Last month we purchased an external hard drive for our computer.  TTO determined it would be the best, and probably cheapest (especially when you account for one's sanity) method for solving a computer problem.  Was it in the budget?  Technically no, but there's enough extra money there that it didn't really matter.  Would we have bought it a year ago?  No. 

What I should have done was take a look at our overall income and expenses for the year, I know in June that number was promising, so there's hope that overall we are saving as much as we can.