On Being Spent

The last twelve days have been exhausting. My husband and I are both physically and financially spent. Wow, being a gracious host takes a toll on you and your finances.

But I am sad, this morning we took my sister and my niece to the airport so they could catch their flight back home. It had been two years since I last saw them but hopefully it will be much less before we see them again. They were here with us for the last twelve days and those days we spent shopping and showing them around.

As tired as I feel I decided to spend a few minutes accounting for our expenditures during the past few days. I debated doing this because sometimes it’s so much easier to just bury my head in the sand but I needed to be honest with myself and our finances.

So here it goes:
$75.41 Spent on groceries
$165.04 Eating out
$120 Gas for driving around and round trip to Chicago
$22 Tickets and parking to Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago (inlaws are members, so we only needed one extra adult ticket)
$190 Membership and parking to Shedd Aquarium in Chicago
$75 Spent boarding our dogs while we traveled to Chicago
$150 Shopping
Holy Crud!! for a total of $797.45 It sure adds up quickly!

I won’t rationalize or feel bad about it. It’s my family and I don’t get to see them often at all. I would spend just as much if my brother and other sister decided to come visit me too. However, we will get to enjoy the aquarium membership for another 15 months and my son loved it. The money will come out from savings to pay this off. Although we only charged gas (5% card discount) and the museum membership. But the rest came from our monthly budget and now we need to transfer some money from savings to pay some of the monthly bills. My husband gets an extra paycheck in May, which we usually send to our cash savings, not this time I guess.

Good news is: I am back! But after all of this spending I feel all out of money saving ideas or what not.

PS. Oldest son turns 3 today! Oh! and his gift from us was a used bike, haha! there you go; a money saving idea: gift a used bike to your toddler who doesn’t know yet the difference between old and new.