Lucky Robin's Personal Finance Blog

Today was the day of the auto deposit of $10 to savings, bringing the new total of the Emergency Fund to $5471.64. $28.36 to go to hit my July goal of $5500.

I also added 58 cents to the coin jar. Baby steps still move you forward.

My homeowner's association sent out the bill for the half year dues. Apparently the fee has been lowered to $100. I had saved $127 for it, so I transferred the extra $27 to the Emergency Fund. The new total in the Emergency Fund is $5461.64. I need to come up with $38.36 to meet my July goal of $5500.

I added $8.78 to the coin jar, which is all the ones and the change DH had in his wallet before he left for Alaska. He dumped it all on my nightstand and I just got around to counting it. Plus I found a quarter and a penny this week.

I had to pay a doctor's bill yesterday, so that was $93.77. I have physical therapy today so that will be $90. I have had a major burger craving this week so I may sneak off after physical therapy and get one. I am debating between doing that and making them for dinner. I am just usually so wiped out after physical therapy I often don't want to cook. But I have been doing so well with not eating out. Hopefully I can resist it.

Seems I'm not the only forgetful one this week! So here is my meal planning for dinners this week.

Monday--
Bacon cheeseburgers
Homemade French fries
Coleslaw
Blackberries

Tuesday--
Roasted whole chicken
Baked potatoes
Blueberries
Broccoli

Wednesday--
Chicken quesadillas
Coleslaw
Blackberries

Thursday--
Homemade pizza (Canadian bacon, pepperoni, yellow onions, bell pepper strips)
Coleslaw
Watermelon

Friday--
Fried rabbit
Mashed potatoes and gravy
Salad
Cherries

Saturday--
Rabbit nuggets
Fried potatoes
Blackberries
Salad

Sunday--
Beef chuck pot roast
Corn on the cob
Broccoli
Watermelon

I just spent $15 on bread at the grocery store. $15. Albeit for the good stuff, but $15. On bread. A whole wheat loaf, hamburger buns, hot dog buns, and hoagie rolls. I could have made all that for $3. And I should have. So, once this bread is gone I am hauling out the bread machine and I am going to start making my own bread, rolls, and buns again.

Because do you know what that extra $12 is? It's a quarter of the month's interest charged on my mortgage. It's an organic four pound chicken. It's two nice ribeye steaks on sale. It's 3 gallons of gasoline. It's a small step towards security in my Emergency Fund. It's two pounds of organic hamburger. It's 30 pounds of organic potatoes. It's nine pounds of organic carrots. It's 8 bunches of Lacinato kale. It's twelve pounds of organic yellow onions. It's a few dollars shy of a bag of rabbit pellets. It's 30 pounds of cabbage. It's two pounds of bing cherries. It's two tank tops on the clearance rack or twelve pairs of socks.

Ring, ring, ring, ring. Hello, LuckyRobin? This is your wake-up call.

Assuming our house does not sell, if I continue to make payments of $700 a month, our mortgage will be under $8000 by the December 1st payment. And it will be completely paid off by the November 1st payment of 2014. Of course I am really hoping it sells when we put it on the market, but it is nice to know just exactly how close it is to being paid off.

If I could somehow figure out how to squeeze out $300 more to make a $1000 payment each month it would be at $6500 by the December 1st payment and paid off in full by the July 1st payment of 2014.

Our required payment is only $384.76 so I have always tried to pay extra on it, even if it was only to round the payment up to $400 when we were dirt poor and up to our eyeballs in medical debt. It has only been in the last year that I have been trying to pay $700 a month. I did have a couple of years at $500 a month.

I talked to Mom earlier this week about her travel club. She had wanted to sell it to us at half price, which would be $10,000. DH and I decided we just don't want to take that on, so told her she should try to sell it to someone else. There won't be much more travelling with all four of us, since DD will be in college in another year, which opens up our options a lot more.

When you have a boy and a girl they get to a certain age where they can't share a bed anymore, which makes standard hotel stays pretty bad, especially when there isn't enough room to fit in a roll away bed. And pull out couches are very uncomfortable. We would often have to rent two hotel rooms. So we would make use of Mom's travel club (paying the dues for her on years we used it) so that we could get a condo with two bedrooms, the second of which had twin beds. But you had to book a year in advance practically for anything big and at least six months for anything with beach access. It was useless for quick getaways.

But soon it will be just the 3 of us and two beds in a standard hotel will work fine. Plus there are options we didn't have before, like Airbnb, where you can rent out a home or a small apartment without it being ridiculously expensive. Dues for the travel club were $672 a year. I'd rather save that money on our own and not saddle ourselves with a commitment.

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.

Today is the small payday, but only a little comes out of it since all bills are paid for the month.

$100.00 College Fund
$100.00 Extra to the Emergency Fund
$100.00 Extra to the Laptop Fund
$140.00 Allowances and Cash for Week
----------
$440.00

That leaves me with $488.10 to get through the next two weeks. This should not be a problem as there are no bills due until the autopays the first week of August and we get an extra paycheck on the 26th . DH and I cleaned out one of the freezers last night and found plenty of good meat to base meals around for the next two weeks. We should only need to buy vegetables. There is plenty of fruit that needs to be picked in the garden so I shouldn't have to buy fruit at all.

Besides the $100 extra added to the Emergency Fund, there was also $38, $10, and 28.99 added from various sources this week.

$5257.65 Beginning EF Balance
__100.00 From paycheck
___10.00 Auto Transfer money from yesterday
___38.00 HT Money
+__28.99 Money left in checking from last payday
------------
$5434.64 Ending EF Balance

I have $65.36 left to come up with to hit my July goal of $5500. There are two more auto transfers this month, so that brings it down to $45.36. I have $16 in ones saved in my coin jar, so that brings it down to $29.36 to come up with still by the end of the month. That shouldn't be a problem.

The College Fund now sits at $500 and the replacement Laptop Fund also now sits at $500. DH is still babying his laptop along trying to make it last as long as possible so we can completely save up for a new one first.

The College Fund will get a large infusion when the Christmas Bonus comes and again when we get our tax refund next year, because we have a lot of HSA spending we can deduct. I don't know if we'll max out the HSA this year like we have the past two years, but it is possible. It will come close. Meanwhile I will save $100 every 4 weeks. It will cost about $10,000 a year including books and fees at the local state university or $7000 a year at the local community college.

The Christmas Bonus is supposed to be quite large this year due to the number of Capital projects done. Not really sure what quite large means, but it should be closer to what he got the first year and not what he got the second year. I am not counting on anything at all, though. I know that if necessary we can do it just on the tax refund and what we are saving alone. The bonus will just be gravy.

Is it really only Thursday? Feels like I hit the ground running and never stopped. Just outdoor farm chores and indoor house cleaning and organizing and building rabbit tractors and moving rabbits outside in the morning and back inside in the evening and chicken care, etc.

We ate our first homegrown, home slaughtered, home butchered rabbit today. Took me almost a month before I was ready to take one out of the freezer and cook it, but now I know we can do this self-sufficiency thing.

I have been very busy picking berries. Because of the heat wave we have blackberries, raspberries and blueberries all ripe at once. This never happens. It is always staggered through the summer. So we are hustling to get as much picked as we can to freeze for the upcoming year.

We have spent very little this week. Mostly for things like milk for us and fresh chard and carrots for the rabbits. We are sticking to the meal plan well and DS has stopped asking to go to the store and buy chicken pot pies, his weakness. I am determined to keep our spending down and I am feeling better with several home cooked meals under my belt again. When you get out of the habit, you really get out of the habit.

One of these days I will get back to posting these on Sundays again! First off, though, I added $6.32 to the coin jar, with the eventual destination of the Emergency Fund.

Okay, so I have been a really lazy cook lately. I mean sandwiches and crockpot food lazy. And I'm really okay with that. The heat saps almost all of our energy right now, and what little we have is used up on taking care of the livestock and their assorted messiness. But anyway, back to the food front.

Monday:
--Spaghetti and Meatballs (no fruit, no veggies, it is what it is)

Tuesday:
--Leftover cold duck made into a salad
--Leftover cold spaghetti
--Casaba Melon

Wednesday:
--Chicken fried rabbit
--Fried potatoes
--Cole slaw
--Watermelon

Thursday:
--Tacos made in the microwave
--Fresh blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries (because of the heat they are all ripe at the same time in our yard for the first time ever)

Friday:
--Homemade pizza (Canadian bacon, pepperoni, yellow onion, red bell peppers)
--Cole slaw
--Leftover fruit salad

Saturday:
--Leftover rabbit quesadillas
--Green beans
--Corn
--Leftover fruit salad

Sunday:
--Crockpot beef chuck roast
--Microwave baked potatoes
--Broccoli/cauliflower
--Fresh blueberry cornbread muffins

I had physical therapy this morning. It cost $90. I'm not walking crooked anymore.

Working hard to get all the Crazy Eights codes today at Swagbucks. So far I've gotten them. If you don't know about swag codes and you do Swagbucks, every so often they release special codes that you can enter in to get extra SB's. Today their are supposed to be doing 8 different codes. You can find them on their Facebook page.

Not sure how much it is going to cost, but we need to get a couple more glass water bottles for the rabbits. We started weaning Piper's litter yesterday and the two kits we took away won't drink out of the plastic water bottles, but neither will Piper and the other kits. We had to take one of the two off Piper's cage and just make sure we are filling them more often. The one store has them for $12.95 for the 32 ounce bottle, but they were sold out.

We will go to the other store and see if they have any in. While we are there we will pick up some more feed, since DH is home to carry it. Will also pick up the rabbit tunnel I didn't get last time we were there and maybe a couple of little balls for the rabbits to play with. If they have all that I want, we should spend about $80 plus tax there.

We lost a kit yesterday, one of Phoebe's week old ones. It was sad and she was upset, but seems fine today. Poor little thing fell out of the cage when it was being cleaned and no one saw it happen. It burrowed into the hay to keep warm and got stepped on.

DH finished all the rabbit tractors and got all the new cages built. We should be set for a while. Can't think of anything else.

Funding Update on the Funds

$127.00 Dues Fund
$300.00 Property Tax Fund
$200.00 Propane Fund
$400.00 Hawaii 2018 Fund
$405.21 Appliance Fund
$400.00 College Fund
$400.00 DH's Laptop Fund
1000.00 Daughter's Laptop Fund
$300.00 Christmas Fund (Plus $155 Amazon GC's)
----------
3532.21

Friday was payday and here is an accounting of the bills that went out and the funds that got funded. Oh, but first, we splurged and got burgers, milkshakes, fries, (the kids and DH) and fish and chips (me) from Boomers, an old-fashioned drive-up restaurant with carhops and everything. We won't be eating out again this week, though. it cost $40.98. They have really good fish and chips. Well, the cod is really good. The halibut is only good. Best burgers though, anywhere, ever.

Okay, so the money out:

$1700.00 BoA VISA (mostly work travel expenses)
___36.26 Electric Old House
___44.87 Phone Old House
___70.56 Internet
___19.00 Garbage (Holding Tank)
___19.00 HoA Dues (Holding Tank)
___72.00 Water/sewer Old House (Holding Tank)
__757.82 Van Loan (plus extra)
__100.00 Property Tax (Holding Tank)
__100.00 Hawaii 2018
__100.00 Propane Old House
__100.00 College Fund
__100.00 Christmas Fund
__100.00 Laptop Fund
___40.00 Allowances (plus bonuses)
__100.00 Cash for week
------------
$3459.51 Total Money Out

There was $30.26 left in checking when payday came on Friday so I transferred it the Emergency Fund. That brings the new total in the EF to $5257.65.

I forgot to do any meal planning this week at all. So I'm just going to finish up for Saturday and Sunday, and then start over for the new week.

Saturday:
--Fried rabbit
--Baked potatoes
--Broccoli/cauliflower

Sunday:
--Duck slow-cooked in the crockpot
--Leftover baked potaotes
--Leftover Broccoli/cauliflower

I forgot to post this on Thursday, but the auto deposit of $10 hit savings.

$5230.54 Beginning EF Amount
+__10.00 Amount Added
----------
$5240.54 New EF Amount

It took longer than usual for the mortgage to hit this time because I mailed it. Only a couple of days, though. I had too much going on at the time to swing by there and wanted to make sure it arrived on time. So the new mortgage total is $11,264.80. $10K is getting closer and closer. Only $54.59 went to interest. I can't wait until it drops below $50 a month.

I sent for and received another Swagbucks cashout of a $5 Amazon gift card. I now have $150 in Amazon gift cards earmarked for Christmas. I also have $200 cash saved for Christmas, so a total of $350 so far. Not too shabby.

We built more rabbit tractors and now have enough for every rabbit to be outside on nice days unless they are more than three weeks pregnant or nursing young kits, in which case they will not leave the rabbit shed, until the kits are 4 weeks old.

Phoebe's litter is still doing great. They are five days old, fur is coming in, and they are nursing well. We can't tell which bunny was born on the wire, they all look healthy and strong.

We spent $169 on fireworks. This is the last year that it is legal to let them off within the city limits, although we did sign a petition to reverse the city council's arbitrary decision that they made with no input from the people of the city. We probably didn't need to spend any of it, considering what our neighbors let off, including multiple aerial fireworks that were already illegal as of this year in the city limits. After watching what they set off we moved to the end of the driveway and watched the fireworks over the bay from the city. Then we let off our fountains and went to bed. This is the first year I didn't hear fireworks after midnight.

We hope to have a house outside the city limits next year. The county is far less intrusive into your life than the city. But who knows if that will ever happen, since they are still not done fixing up our house. Middle of June, my eye. At this rate it won't be done until summer of next year. I just hope they get the new gutters on before the rainy season starts this fall.

Today is payday. I will do a payday post later when I have everything figured out.

I received a $5 gift card from Swagbucks for Amazon yesterday and will have enough points by the end of the day to send for another one. I have a book on hold at the library so we will be going downtown today. I want to get a few toys to put in the rabbit tractors and look for some more glass water bottles. They really prefer them to the plastic ones.

It's been blazing hot the last few days and most of my attention has gone to making sure that the animals, particularly the rabbits, stayed cool enough. I am happy to report that all nine of the newborn kits have survived the heat wave and it's starting to cool down.

We've been eating a lot of cold meats and vegetables and fruits here lately. Cooking isn't something anyone wants to do because it heats the house up. I've been soaking my head with cool water and that helps quite a bit since I have so much hair. We don't have air-conditioning in this house. I've been using fans and icepacks and one day I even grabbed a bra straight from the washing machine (I wash on cold) and that kept me cool for a couple hours until it dried. That was on the day it was 90.

I'll be using the crockpot a lot this week to help keep the house cool. I'm keeping the blinds and curtains shut during the day, and having them wide open in the evening with fans in them, to cool off the house. Fans go all night and I wake up with a cool house that stays that way for a while. I'm putting ice in all of my drinks (which is usually just water), and making cold meat salads for lunches.

What do you all do to beat the heat? Especially if you don't have air conditioning.

I added $4.54 to the coin jar today.

I also gave in and bought a pizza because it was too hot to cook. Today is only 84, not 90 so I think I can manage to cook tonight. Or make sandwiches. Or salads with cold meat. And cold fruit.

DH comes home at midnight Tuesday. I hope he doesn't melt. He does even worse than me in the heat and we've got a lot of stuff that needs to get done. We may have to set up a fan outside.

One of my rabbits, Phoebe, kindled yesterday. It was an accidental mating that we thought we had interrupted in time, because she was a little young. But just to be on the safe side I gave her a nesting box a few days ago. A good thing I did, too, because she had nine kits. One was born on the wire, but I must have come in within minutes so we were able to rescue it and get it safely tucked in with its siblings. Despite being not quite 6 months old (she will be on the 2nd) she has done very well for her first litter.

That is going to be about 30 pounds of pasture raised meat for us when they grow out, since we have them in the rabbit tractors on any day it isn't raining. They'll eat about $30 worth of feed in those 14 weeks as well as all the fresh grass, herbs, and berry leaves I can harvest from around the lot and a few veggies like chard that are growing in the garden. That is going to work out to be $1 a pound. This is starting to pay for itself now.

We also bred Piper today. Her seven kits will be weaned starting next Sunday and will be out of her cage by the time she is two weeks pregnant. Her current kits will be ready to harvest in 7 weeks.

Our new cages came and we will start assembling those on Wednesday when DH gets home. We spent $305 for three cages, a stacking frame, 3 feeders, and a couple more nest boxes plus shipping. We will likely spend $200 more to make 4 more rabbit tractors. Then hopefully we won't have to spend any more on housing this year.

It was very hot yesterday, it got up to 90 degrees F. I had to spend a lot of time checking on the rabbits as they don't do over 80 very well. I've got two circulating fans in the shed, and they have frozen water bottles that go into their cages and they lay against them to help cool off. Rabbits only lose heat through their ears, so they need help in keeping cool when the weather is like this. It's supposed to be like this all week so I won't be going anywhere for very long. I do hope to get some swimming in though.

My Capital One 360 account posted the interest. It was $3.15. I added it to the Emergency Fund.

$5227.39 Beginning Amount
+___3.15 Interest Added
-------------
$5230.54 New Balance

Yesterday was payday. I had a couple of things left on the June Budget spreadsheet, and then set up and started recording things for the July Budget spreadsheet. I figured out which bills would be coming out of which paycheck. As long as nothing comes up we should be able to handle everything and have some money left over for savings. Of course that is the small check that stretches over two weeks, so I won't know how much I will have to save until the July 26th paycheck. I am hoping for at least $200.

Anyway, the bills I paid out were:

$1000.00 to Mom (July)
__300.00 to Mom for July utilities
__100.00 to EF
__140.00 Cash for week (includes allowances)
___90.00 Physical Therapy
___39.53 Life Insurance DH
___32.70 Life Insurance Me
___66.62 Car Insurance
___45.67 Old House Insurance
___41.16 Old House Security System
__168.00 Storage
__700.00 Mortgage (plus extra)
__270.49 to AMEX (in full)
__100.00 to Appliance Fun
----------
$3094.17 Total Paid Out

Our regular mortgage payment is less than $400, so we added a little over $300 extra to the mortgage principle for the July payment. The August payment should put us well under $11K. I am hoping to have it under $10K by September, but I'm not sure if we will. We'll have to see.

I had a bit of a kerfuffle with my mother yesterday. Not an argument per se, just her trying to force her will on stuff. She wants to be the one who sets the selling price on our house and she wants to be there to read the paperwork when it sells, etc. I told her no and she didn't react well. She thinks we should try to sell the house by owner instead of through a realtor and I said no again. FSBO's take forever to sell.

She was there for all of that stuff when we bought this house, but we were young, DH was in Alaska when the house sold so I had to have temporary power of attorney for him on that sale, it was our first house, and we needed her experience. But now we've been through it and we are older and we know what we are doing. She's very opinionated and wants her nose in every aspect of our business. I have asked her in to certain areas (like medical), but she isn't always so good about waiting to be asked. And I don't want her nose in our financials.

I think she's got it in her head that we are rich. I'm not sure where she gets that from. Yes, DH makes a very good income, but that's only in the last five years or so. And we have spent most of the last five years aggressively paying down the medical debt we incurred when I was so ill and having multiple surgeries so it's not like we felt that money. I never let her know the extent of it, just the amount she loaned us and we are paying her back.

It has only been this year that we have been able to pull ahead and start saving money or take a real vacation again. We might be rich some day, it's possible, but that's only if the economy doesn't tank over the next twenty years and we start getting serious interest on savings accounts again. But we have college to try to pay for with two kids and retirement to save for and we are behind from getting out of debt. Not to mention we'll be buying a new house when this one sells.

She has no idea of our income because we won't tell her. Mom lives on her social security, the $1000 a month we pay her, and we give her money to pay for all of the electric, gas, water/sewer bills, and pay the garbage directly. I know she's saving at least $1000 a month from it and living on the rest. Her only expenses are gas, property tax with a senior exemption to lower it, vehicle taxes, prescriptions, and food. The house has been paid for for a long time and is worth at least $300,000 and that's estimating on the low side, so she can sell it in the future and get a smaller house and live off the rest of it if needed.

She's so worried about the future that she won't spend today. We'll be paying her back until she's 80 unless we up the payments, which she doesn't want, and of course, we've told her numerous times that we will make sure she is taken care of if she lives longer than that.

I don't know, but I'm not going to let her force her insecurities on us, by trying to control what we do with selling the house. I am grateful for everything my mother has done for us, don't get me wrong. And I love her very much. After DH, she is my probably my best friend. We get along very well most of the time. Just once in a while she gets very pushy. I've learned through experience that this is the time where I have to push back.

Today was payday. I had $55.77 left in checking so I transferred the to the EF. I also took out the monthly $100 that I usually take out of the first check of the new pay cycle. This just happens to be in June instead of July, so June got two $100 payments. I will still make one in July towards the end of the month though, when the next pay cycle starts.

That brings the new balance in the Emergency Fund to $5227.39. My goal for June was $5100, so I blew by that. I think I am going to stretch and try to come up with $5500 by the end of July. That is $272.61 to come up with. $140 will be from my regular transfers, so I will still need to eek out $132.61 to meet that goal, well, minus a few dollars of interest. It is doable, especially if I keep transferring the amounts left at the end of each pay week to savings.

I really want to stretch for that, because I want to hit $7000 by the end of the year. It may or may not be possible, but I want to shoot for it regardless.

Today is the day of the auto deposit to savings, bringing the Emergency Fund to $5071.62.

I haven't spent any money in the past two days. We haven't gone anywhere, which makes it a lot easier to accomplish that.

I've been following my meal plans, so no eating out recently.

I'm still working on cleaning. It's taking a lot longer than I planned because I am organizing as well as just cleaning.

The rabbits are doing well. They love it when it is nice out and they can come outside in the rabbit tractors. The kits are growing well and will be 7 weeks old on Sunday. A couple of them were close to weighing 3 pounds last Sunday, so will probably top it when I weigh them again this Sunday.

Swagbucks is chugging along well, though I wish they'd fix the SBTV glitches. I've hit goal every day this week except the day it was 140. I will definitely get all five GC's this month as I am only a few points away from it right now.

Otherwise it's been pretty boring here at Casa de Robin.

I received another $5 gift card from Swagbucks. I transferred it to my Amazon account. My GC balance there is now $145. I'm saving it for Christmas. I have hit my daily goals for the last several days, except for Tuesday. 140 is too high to waste the time on it. I'll probably hit today's though as I have a lot of online reading to do this afternoon and can have SBTV running the whole time.

I added $5.95 to the coin jar. Two more nickels and I'll have enough for a roll.

I've got $20 in cash and $55.77 in the checkbook to get me through until payday Friday. I need to buy milk and I want to buy strawberries if the specific farm stand I like the berries from is open. I hope that it is.

Our big screen television quit working. I can't figure out why. It turns on, there is just no image. DH will have to look at it when he comes home next week. I'm not terribly upset by it. Well, I mean, it's only four years old, I think, it should still be running, so from a consumer stand point I'm irked, but I'm not in any hurry to go out and buy a new one. We don't have television service, the kids just played games on it or sometimes watched DVDs.

I let the kids take the television out of my bedroom. We never use it. It had a thick layer of dust on the top and the screen that had to be wiped off and the remote batteries were dead. It's about ten years old and while it has a flat screen it still has the ginormous backside the old tech had. It's just 20 inches.

It is possible the big screen can be fixed, but I don't see much point in buying a new one. DH and I watch stuff on our laptops, generally. I have to admit it is nice for the big sci-fi shows, but I can't even remember the last time I used it. Maybe after we move we might replace it. I just don't want to move a big TV ourselves. It is a pain. Better to have it delivered to our next abode if we even bother with it at all. Those TV's are such energy hogs.

I have an appointment with the sleep doctor in 9 hours. As you can tell from the time stamp he's not done me much good. Our insurance is switching to Premera next month. Hopefully they will accept that. They stopped accepting Aetna, (and rightly so, since Aetna are cheapskates, whose first response is to deny everything at least once) so the last couple visits have been out of pocket.

I'm going to try one more mask and if that doesn't work, I'm done. I just can't use the machine if I'm taking the mask off in my sleep because it doesn't fit right or is uncomfortable.

Well, I suppose I should try yet again to get some sleep. I'm quitting caffeine right now (again) so I won't have that as a crutch tomorrow.

Basing a lot of my meals this week on using up meat in the freezer to make room for upcoming harvests and the possibility of getting a half a beef in December (the latest the ranch has them available until Spring). I want to make a goal of not buying any meat at the grocery store at least until August. I don't see any reason we need to do that, based on supplies on hand.

Wednesday:
Cheatloaf
Green beans
Nectarines

Thursday:
Spaghetti and Meatballs
Coleslaw

Friday:
Tacos
Strawberries

Saturday:
Roasted chicken
Baked potatoes
Broccoli
Nectarines

Sunday:
Crockpot roast beef
Mashed potatoes and gravy
Strawberries
Green beans

Monday:
Pork chops
Fried potatoes
Watermelon
Cole slaw

Tuesday:
Leftover mish-mash and if no leftovers (ha!), then toasted ham and cheese sandwiches and chicken noodle soup

I think after this week I will be ready to start incorporating rabbit into our meals. I figured it would take me a couple of weeks to get over growing and slaughtering our own mean and I'm feeling about there now. Apparently this is a very common phenomenon in people who have never really farmed or raised livestock for food before.

Last night (or early this a.m.) when I copy/pasted my entry, apparently I missed the second half of my post, where I was trying to figure out how much I thought I could get the Emergency Fund to by the end of the year.

In August there will be an extra payday for us. I should be able to save $1000 to the Emergency Fund from that. I have also been able to save at least $200 a month, so that should be another $1200. That should put me at $7300. In November there will be another extra paycheck, and I'd like to save $1000 from it, which should put me at $8300. So I think I will make my push goal be $8500 by the end of the year, which is, coincidentally, about one month's take home pay.

Most of the remainder of the money from those two extra payday's will go into the holiday shut down fund. Every Christmas things tend to shut down on the slope for two weeks at the least and up to four weeks at the most. So I will set aside at the least $3600 for that. That should leave me with about $1400 between the two.

I think I will try to just put it all into temporary savings. I'm not sure for what. Probably some of it for rabbit expenses. Or possibly moving expenses depending on how things go with selling our house. I guess we'll see when I get closer to that time. I may just want to shovel it all into the Emergency Fund regardless. Or maybe save it for next year's medical deductible.

So out of this paycheck I spent:

$225.00 on monthly family chiropractor plan
$650.00 to BoA VISA
$442.00 on groceries
$144.00 on water/sewer old house
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1463.00 total spent

Not all of this was from this paycheck actually. I had $400 left from the last one.

I also put $70 into the Emergency Fund bringing me to officially over $5000 at $5061.62. So I've hit my June savings goal. I wonder if I can get it to $5100 by the end of the month? Quite possibly if I don't buy anymore groceries.

Found a penny and put it in the coin jar. Nothing else to report.

Now that it is summer vacation and I am not homeschooling anymore, I am working on getting my home organized. I did the long hallway today, which had become a catch all for way too much junk. My husband has a habit of emptying his pockets into the rail. I find all sorts of things in it. Junk mail, credit card receipts, pens and pencils, tiny toys like my son's hex bug. I found a quarter and a dime so those went into the coin jar.

I had gotten so far behind on laundry that I had six baskets of clean laundry in the hallway, so those all got sorted and put away. Then all the random shoes got sent back to their home on the shoe rack by the back door. It's never a whole set of shoes it's always a single shoe from four or five sets. I don't even know.

Also got all the cloth grocery bags picked up and stuck inside the big one, ready to go out to the van the next time we leave the house. I've mentioned it before, but we are in a city that has made it illegal for stores to use plastic bags and it costs 5 cents a bag for paper ones. We have a ton of cloth bags instead. I would use them anyway and did before the law went into effect, but I have way more than I did back then.

I figure if I work on one room a day we can get things back on track in not too long a time frame. Tomorrow's goal is to get the kitchen straightened up. I'd like to use more than 1/2 my kitchen table and the counters need a deep clean. I also need to reorganize my canned goods, because my daughter has put things in willy-nilly just to get them put away and I like to have my cupboards a certain way so I'll go through and fix them after stuff is clean.

Saturday will be for the short hallway that leads from my son's room into the living room and ends at the computer table and the bathroom. Sunday will be for the living room. Monday I'll tackle my bedroom, while the kids start on theirs. That may take more than one day as I want to weed through all the outgrown clothing, throw out what is not donateable, and get the stuff that is ready to take to Goodwill. And honestly I'm sure nothing short of a bulldozer will get to the bottom of my daughter's bedroom floor. My son's room is not too bad. He's a much tidier person in his bedroom than my daughter.

I find being disorganized often leads to spending money, either because I can't find something or I don't realize I already have what I just bought. Tired of that so the organization is a must. Plus I have lost a library book somewhere in the house and need to find it. Well, I'm not sure I lost it. I think I turned it in, but the library can't find it so they gave me a month to look for it without a fine. I don't even have a clue where it might be. There's just not that many places I would leave a book.

I am just really ready to have a clean home again. Tired of the clutter.

Today is the day of the auto transfer to savings, so the new amount in the Emergency Fund is $4991.62.

I added $2.40 to the coin jar.

I cashed out for yet another $5 Amazon gift card from Swagbucks. I've hit the daily goal three times this week.

I did a jobs and the economy survey for ACOP.

I haven't had any no spend days this week, but the amounts I have spent have been trivial.

I've been watching a lot of Netflix while I've been cleaning. Finished Heroes, which I've been working on for a year. Started Alias which I have never watched.

I still haven't put together my payday post from last Friday so I'm just going to do a brief run down here. I've rounded because I don't want to open my spread sheets.

$2000.00 went to BoA Visa and vacation is paid off.
$1000.00 went to the EF
__187.00 went to medical
__160.00 went to groceries
___30.00 went to allowances
___69.00 went to prescriptions
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$3446.00 Total out

I'm beat. Who knew raising rabbits was going to be so much work? But it is so worth it. Today that work paid off in spades. We were able to put some of the rabbits out in the new rabbit tractors we built. Every day that the weather permits and we are home, they will get to go out on the grass and play.



They had such a good time today. The kits were racing back and forth, leap frogging over each other and doing binkies, which is the ultimate sign of a happy rabbit. Even Mama Piper was doing binkies. It is quite a sight to see an eleven pound rabbit leap straight up and then change direction in mid-air. She even did some running herself.

It was so much fun to watch them. We watched them off and on for two hours while we cleaned some of the cages. We will clean more of them tomorrow. It is wonderful to see the rabbits so happy. They were thrilled with being on the shed floor to run around, but nowhere near as thrilled as they were to be on fresh grass and clover and with raspberry and lemon balm leaves to eat.

Every day we will move the tractors forward a space and they will eat the lawn (free of pesticides or chemical fertilizers) down. We shouldn't have to mow at all this summer. Not only will this cut their feed bill down, but it will naturally fertilize the grass.

The total cost for the supplies to make the two tractors came in at around $100. Considering that a pen half the size of one of these costs $75, we did good.

We rearranged the rabbit shed yet again and we now have what I think is the most efficient use of space. It was a lot of work, but is now much easier to move around in. DH still needs to build a new hutch frame and I need to buy 3 more cages. We will also need to build some more rabbit tractors, but for now they can take turns. I would like to put Serenity and Sweetie Belle in a tractor with Lola, but I'm not sure they'd get along. Phoebe and Lola did not when we had them on the shed floor at the same time. Does can be very territorial if they are not from the same litter and even sometimes when they are.

I know I still need to do an accounting of last week's bills, but I'm so tired I'm going to put it off for yet another day.