I'm working on our budget reconciliation for the end of the month.
The good news is, we are under on our dining out/entertainment budget! Woohoo! (If we go over a bit in one category I try to cover it from the other normally, so I can still see the break down of dining vs entertainment at the end of the month/year) There's even enough left we could do a fast casual meal with all of us, or a cheap sit down with everyone, or something a little more but with just DH and I. But I'm hoping to not do that.
On the other hand, we went over on groceries and our personal care budgets. I think that one needs bumped up a little anyways, and we both ended up getting hair cuts this month (normally they don't line up like that - but I took off about 10 inches!), and there were some deals on things like shampoo so I stocked up a bit. Groceries is just... eek. But we bought steak a few times, which we never do, and stocked up on things, and hopefully next month should be way under because I feel like we will now have 90% of things for a ton of meals and will only need to replace milk and produce. We did a Sam's and Costco run over the weekend, which we could have pushed off til June officially, but I work this coming weekend so it was easier to go now. For now, I'm just covering the overages from our slush fund which is really high currently due to DHs work travels.
I had forgotten that this is a 3 paycheck month for both of us, and also DH got his biggest commission check ever, so our income for the month looks pretty crazy. He has several big jobs that are finally paying out, and the check for next month is supposed to be even bigger than this one. My part was contributing $1800 in takehome from OT pay
Sooooo goodbye car loan #2! Okay, not completely, but we will make a very sizeable dent in it
I'll probably hold back a little bit as 'fun' money... I have learned that if I keep a little now and let DH do something, it works out better overall than if it all funnels into goals and then next month he wants to do something... and it somehow ends up costing more overall than if I had just kept a bit out in the first place
plus I'm trying to pull/cover it from other budgets.
Beyond that, we have picked up our gym routine again. I've been using MyFitnessPal and my step tracker to track everything, so I'm just focusing on drinking more water, being more conscious of what I eat/only eating when hungry, that sort of thing, getting up and moving throughout the day to hit my steps goal, exercising, etc. I figure if I can keep these habits up until our cruise trip in June that will be a good starting point. Speaking of the cruise, we leave exactly 3 weeks from today! We are spending 3 days at Disney before my in laws fly in the day before the cruise, then 5 night cruise, then 2 days for Kennedy Space Center/possibly beach time. Currently I've got $850 in cash put aside and just over $900 in Disney gift cards for the rest of the expenses, which I think will cover everything but I plan to fine tune everything this week.
Hopefully I will be back in a week or so to update on what kind of damage we did on the car loan