Thursday, January 15, 2009

January Half Month pulse check: Getting my bearings back

After two months of extraordinary expenses and whirlwind activity ( buying gifts, packing, travel, sight-seeing, jet-lag) we are trying to settle back into routine life. Last weekend was a weekend at home after a long time and I did appreciate the time to catch my breath.
We celebrated the down-time by watching back to back bollywood flicks ( me), repairing the laptop (BEB) and having some heart-to-heart talks about our financial goals in 2009 ( more on that later).
Now on to our financial status for the first half of January: Things are again falling into place after a long time, so far our balancesheet shows all the regular amounts and some of the extra expenses from our trip to Europe, but since there weren't many big expenses during the trip, so far it looks good.
One small change has been in the newspaper bill, which they keep on increasing every 6 months, but I couldn't take it anymore. So I had called the Customer Service and showed my disapproval of their policy and canceled my subscription. I'll probably buy only Sunday newspaper to get coupons from now on.
All the other expenses look fairly balanced, but we got a big shocker in the form of our IT dues. We made a mistake in calculating our dues for the year, and now we have to cough up something to the tune of 10K before March. That would mean no savings for two more months. Oh! How I hate it when we have to live on zero savings, and this is going to be the fourth consecutive month, bravo!
On the brighter side, had we known about this we would have reconsidered our trip to Europe and that would mean missing out on so many beautiful experiences and memories. Good that we came to know about our goof up only when we came back. I hope to still squeeze in some small savings by cutting corners here and there. I'll keep you posted.

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