DH took a preliminary run at our taxes. He is only waiting for the interest from one account. He will call on Monday to get it, but since that account never has more than $500 in it at any one time, it won't be very much. Right now it looks like we will be getting back $8500. That's a couple hundred less than last year, but DH had a bigger income last year because of a higher bonus.

Now before someone says anything about adjusting our withholding so we don't get so much back and have more during the year, we can't. DH already takes the legal number of withholdings. It is not like in the old days when you could claim 47 deductions. The laws are very strict now. And also, $6150 of what we are getting back is due to maxing out and using the full amount of the HSA this year. Without that it would be $2350.

Anyway, so I need to figure out what we will do with that money besides paying off the Chase card. Chase will be at $4900 by the time we get our refund back. So that will leave us with $3600. $1000 of that will go to purchase DD a MacBook, since I wiped out the MacBook fund to pay off debt. So that just leaves $2600.

I think I will let that money sit for a while in case we go over budget while at Disneyland. I don't know if we will or not, but I don't want to have new debt built up on one of the cards. So if we use it, we'll pay it off. Mostly I'd like to put $2000 in the EF. I am aiming towards getting it to $18,000, and then more slowly to $32,000, which will take a few years, especially with college coming up.

DD has agreed to doing her first two years at the local community college and then most likely doing 2 years in the Peace Corp before coming back to do a couple more years at the local university. The community college does offer Japanese. She'll be talking her 3rd year of high school Japanese next year, so college Japanese would help to reinforce that.

I just wish they taught Mandarin. They do offer it at WWU. Actually China is one of the countries that the Peace Corp works in, and the language training is pretty intensive before they send you in. Something like 5 hours a day for three months, if I remember right. But she isn't sure about China. She's thinking more about one of the islands or Africa. I don't want to push her in any one direction, because it's her life and her choice, but learning Mandarin would pretty much guarantee her a well-paying job in certain fields.

I just worry about the future of my kids. I want them to be able to get jobs they can support themselves on in a faltering economy. I can lead them to the proper areas based on their interests, but I can't push them in. It has be something they are interested in, otherwise it is a waste of both time and money.

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I added $10 to the EF, bringing the total to $1725.35. Just $174.65 left to meet my February goal of $1900.