Wow. July is finally upon us. For months now, we’ve been making plans for various exciting events this month. For starters, it’s our daughter’s 5th birthday this month. Instead of spending a ton of money on a huge party, we have decided to take a little bit more reserved approach. We have invited just a couple of our daughter’s friends and their families out to the lake for a weekend. One family will spend the night, and the other will just be out for the day. I think we’ll have a great time and keeping it smaller seems much more manageable.
We are also headed to Montana this month to visit family and attend my cousin’s wedding. We are really looking forward to this trip and are excited to see everyone there. Family will be coming in from multiple cities in the US so it should be a wonderful time to catch up. We have rented a car and will be splitting gas and the cost of the rental three ways so it’s going to be quite affordable. We still have the hotel expense and food etc, but we expect the total cost of the trip will be just under $1000. Believe me, it could be a LOT worse. If we had decided to fly the cost would have easily doubled.
This coming weekend we’ll be enjoying friends and family out at the lake. There is a large fireworks show planned and we’ll also be having a large community picnic at the community park. I think it’s going to be great!
On a somewhat unrelated note, I took a little time this weekend to look at all the major expenditures we have coming up. We have a few significant expenses in the next couple months. There is some much needed car maintenance in our future, a large community assessment for the water system at our lake house community, the trip to Montana, annual taxes for our lake house, and finally, we owe a couple thousand more to my friend that helped build our lake house.
To offset some of these expenses we also have some extra money coming in over the next couple months that will mitigate most of these. We still haven’t received our stimulus check which should be about $1500. Additionally we also expect a bonus from my company and an extra paycheck in the next few months. To get a good idea of the impacts to our budget I built a simple spreadsheet to see how the expenses vs the extra income stack up. I initially thought that all these things would be hitting at once, but realized that they are fairly well spread out through the rest of the year so they shouldn’t be too much of an issue.