May 1st, 2007 - HEL money, update 4 April

April’s totals:

Chase rewards: $25
E*Rewards: $25
AutoVantage: $10 (one of the trials I did through DealBarbie. When I called to cancel, they offered me another free month and sent out coupons for rebates on gas and oil changes. I hope to get another $10 rebate before the trial ends! Hope to also get money back on the oil change being done today.)
DealBarbiePays: $153.20

Total: $223
Running total: $745
New policy: If we get in over $50/month, Eric and I split the difference. This is after taxes are taken out, of course.

Concurrently with bringing a bit extra in, we are also focusing on keeping our household and grocery spending in check.

Groceries: $65
Household: $0 (wonderful as we bought diapers, wipes, and laundry detergent in bulk this month)

Another new policy: As another incentive to keep these two under budget, overages will…
1) go to the other budget area (for instance, we were -$3 in household originally)
2) $15 will go towards the snowblower
3) the rest will be split 3 ways: 1/3rd will remain for future overages, 2/3rds will either go to the date fund or to our personal spending money (to be decided each month).

This month, we did 1 & 2, the first part of 3, $7 to the date fund, and the rest is going towards the snowblower.

Confusing? Yes. But at the moment it’s working for us and is much simply in practice than it appears written out.

I’ll write about the snowblower later.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 at 11:06 am EDT and is filed under Money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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