Seventy-six (trom)bones

I just deleted the "Amount We Have Saved This Year" section at right. I deleted it because we are going DOWN, folks, DOWN.

I am trying to remember what we'd saved at our peak. I want to say it was like $18,000. But does anyone remember for sure?

Anyway, now to our name we have $7,631.88. I had to pay a gigantic COBRA payment, and I don't even like snakes, and this move cost more than I thought. Plus, we are living on nearly $100,000 less than we were at the beginning of the year. So into savings we dipped.

I know I should look on the bright side. If we hadn't gone this year without spending, we'd have NO savings whatsoever, which is pretty much what we had the other nine years of our marriage. We always had like $500 or maybe a big $1,000 saved. Which as a dual-income couple with no children was inexcusable! You know it was.

So, nearly eight thousand bucks is actually pretty exciting. As long as we can LEAVE IT ALONE from here on out. Which we may not be able to do, actually.

We are living with one car, and it is not pretty. It is, in fact, ugly. For example, my one outing I have is my volunteer work at the assisted living facility. I can't walk there (I tried to chose a place I could walk to but I accidentally picked a place more than three miles away, through a terrible neighborhood. Oops.), so I have to wait, hovering, like a spider, when Marvin gets home from school. He usually gets home after 4:00, so I LEAP into the car and TEAR over to the home to play this book on tape for Miss Lilly, a blind woman. I have to get there with enough time to play the tape before dinner, which is at 5:00.

So remember how I sold my VW Bug to my mother? Turns out she is not happy with it and wants to sell it, so she is willing to sell it back to us, at whatever monthly payment we can afford. We are thinking about it, trust me.

I know that buying a CAR certainly counts as SPENDING, though. And we are trying to be really really really really strict on our policy now. Even if I did buy some red velvet creme-filled Bingles at the grocery store last night, which I do not think is a cheat, as the rule is we can only buy what we could not make ourselves, and I assure you I do not know how to make red velvet creme-filled Bingles. But OLD June, beginning-of-the-year June, would not have allowed it.

And one more thing. I really have to remember that I did not do this year of no spending in order to save money. In fact, I sincerely thought we were living within our means and that we would save nothing. So having ANY money saved is a PLUS. The POINT was to see what would HAPPEN if we didn't spend. That was it! So, maybe I should get over myself. $7,631.88 will still garner me a lot of Hello Kitty necklaces at year's end.