I have a portion of savings that I call the Holding Tank. It's basically short term savings for things that are not paid monthly, but are paid either every two months (water/sewer, garbage) or every six months, and also for replacement funds or saving for things like a freezer or college. Today I decided to reconcile the amount of money in my Capital One 360 account with my spreadsheet for the Holding Tank/Emergency Fund. I found an error of $444.31 in my favor. I had almost $450 more in there than I thought.

It took me a while to track down what I did. When I paid the property taxes in April, I paid it directly out of checking with the idea that I would shift the money in the property tax portion of the Holding Tank to other categories, instead of transferring money out of C1360 and then transferring money back into C1360. Well, apparently I erased it from the property tax column on the spreadsheet when I paid it, but never redistributed the money to other categories. And then I transferred money from checking to those categories anyway from the paycheck.

I have decided to allocate that $444.31 to the January Money Fund. At Christmas the slope often shuts down to bare maintenance levels. Usually DH ends up with an extra week or two of unpaid time off in January, which can mean going up to 4 weeks without a paycheck. Since I don't want to dip into our Emergency Fund for that, I try to save at least $2000, but ideally closer to $3600 for that time period. I needed to start saving for that, so this makes a good start. I am really glad this was an error in my favor and not me thinking I had more money than I actually did have.