SOS!
I have to say, this is NOT going to be my typical meticulous budget recap.
THIS IS A DISASTER!
The basic story is this: My parents bought a new boat and we helped outfit it for the big trip to take it home to Alaska. (This included some pretty frivolous purchases like kayaks, fishing poles, and crab pots.)
Along the way, we had to make some unexpected (it’s a boat, after all) repairs that left us stranded in Canada awaiting parts. FOR. FOUR. WEEKS. Yep! Nine people, one dog, and a drydocked boat (four weeks! SERIOUSLY!) with only our legs to take us anywhere.
(Oh, and did I mention a Canadian river got the best of my husband’s “waterproof” phone? Sigh…)
We had been spending with wild abandon before this unexpected turn of events.
We were in deep water! (Financially speaking, of course, as the boat was on dry land.)
There were very limited ways we could cook (if you can call it cooking) while being up on blocks. This lead to a huge increase in fast food and restaurants. Luckily, we were able to stay on the boat which meant we didn’t have to spend a month in a hotel. Thank our lucky stars! We also packed for Alaska (COLD) weather. This lead to purchasing a few pairs of t-shirts and shorts (just a few, thankfully). We spend money on laundromats. And we did purchase a few things like movie tickets, bus rides, and museums entries.
Then to get out of Canada and get home got expensive. There were buses, ferries, shuttles, Ubers, and whatnot just to get our car out of the US and up to Canada to pick us all up.
We stuck our parents, in their newly repaired boat, with the responsibility to take the inside passage back to Alaska while we traveled home to California in time for school.
Honestly, I could make tons of excuses for such an epic fail of budgeting. But, the truth is, we just failed. Yeah, we got stuck in a foreign country with no phones and no internet access. We still could have made the effort to go somewhere with WIFI and track our spending. We chose not to. We knew approximately where we were financial. Mostly, that means we knew we were spending WAY more than we had budgeted for. A day of reckoning was going to happen. We would either fall behind in retirement savings, or we would dip into savings to stay afloat. We chose the former and decided to make the best of a severely interrupted summer vacation.
(Disclaimer: We had a roaring good time in spite of everything!)
In the end, it was very stressful to get back home and start accounting for all that we had spent.
However, when it was done, I felt a HUGE weight come off my shoulders. I knew we had overspent, but now I knew exactly where we stood financially. Most importantly, we made some goals to get back on track.
I will not break down where and how we spent all of our money because, honestly, we didn’t keep all our receipts and don’t know exactly where it all went.
With that HUGE disclaimer, here is what we spent in July and August:
July/August Financial Roundup
Quick Look
Nope!
NO WAY!
Can’t even begin to break down the “Groceries and Household” or “Fun” categories. We just stuck charges in where we thought they best belonged.
We ripped through our summer fund (no surprise there) and fell being in our Roth IRA savings. We now have $2,000 in contributions to make up in the months ahead.
I REALLY hope your summer was a better financial success than ours!
Leave a Reply