Thanks, Alice. As long as it isn't just me!

ING savings: $8334
BOA savings: $750

Car#1 $ 1188
Car#2 $ 688
SL1 $ 6544
SL2 $44635
SL3 $ 0
SL4 $ 7621
Total debt: $60676

Life has gotten very expensive since I last posted. Our cat had been really acting up and misbehaving lately, so the obvious solution was to get him a kitty friend. We went to a shelter that was having a special of waived adoption fees. Our vet does free initial visits for any cat adopted from a shelter. Free kitty, right? Ha!

$1700 later, the free kitty has practically no teeth thanks to a mouth infection the shelter either never saw or didn't have the resources to handle.*sigh* I lovingly call her my champagne toast. She's lucky she's adorable.

Then I went to the dentist. It's going to be about $1000 to get a crown replaced.

On the plus side, my raise is 4% (for as long as I have a job) and my bonus is decent enough. Still no idea if I'll be employed in June.

FH only has 2 more car payments. I only have 3 more. So close.

FMIL paid for my Chinese reception dress, which is good since she was the only who asked me to get it in the first place. $200 saved.

I cannot wait for the day that people stop trying to convince me that spending $200 on a tie is reasonable because it's the only one I've found that has the perfect colors. Arg. Why do weddings drive all the sanity out of people?

ING savings: $8151
BOA savings: $900

Car#1 $ 786
Car#2 $ 341
SL1 $ 6511
SL2 $44524
SL3 $ 0
SL4 $ 7565
Total debt: $59727

Below $60k!

In less exciting news, I'm unofficially certain that I'll be losing my job. There is a 75% chance that they are relocating us to Atlanta, and that is just not something I want to do, especially considering my relo package would probably be pretty low. I'm thinking about switching careers to something I don't have to quit if I get pregnant. My dad is really pushing for us to move to his area, offering us rooms to stay in while we get set up. I'm so stressed over this. There are more jobs for me in that area (in current field), but I don't know about for C.

Wedding finances: Flower budget got increased when my aunt dropped out of doing them. It's easier this way for family reasons, so oh well.

We found ties for super cheap online. They aren't nearly as perfect as the $200 tie, but I'm okay with that.

Booked my hair/nails at the first place that didn't charge an extra 20% for the bride because "we want to make sure your hair is extra perfect!" I always want to say to that "so... you aren't trying on anyone else's hair?"

Returning my $80 shoes for a pair I found that was $13. I love Burlington Coat Factory.

I also had a reminder this weekend why an emergency fund is necessary. My little sister messaged me from her vacation in Israel saying her wallet got stolen, she needs us to wire her money ASAP. It thankfully was not particularly painful to send her $300. Lucky child!

ING savings: $8151
BOA savings: $1200

Car#1 $ 384
Car#2 $ 0
SL1 $ 6475
SL2 $44403
SL3 $ 0
SL4 $ 7565
Total debt: $58827

Hooray for paid off car#2!!

I've been having multiple panic attacks over paying for the wedding. Even though theoretically everything is fine, the little expenses are starting to add up. Of course, my fiance's answer to this is to spend more money to chill me out. He has this irritating belief that the money will just magically appear when we need it. I did feel much better after getting that facial, though...

Some of our wedding expenses have been completely worth it, though unexpected. $450 a month in couples therapy to make sure that we are on the right page - something I would recommend to everyone getting married. We fight more than we did before, but our fights are more productive.

It has been a good lesson in where good enough works. Our incredibly cheap on clearance invites? We have gotten so many compliments on them.

I will admit to caving in to something I swore I wouldn't do. Centerpiece decorations have been driving me crazy. I categorically hate spending money on non-functional decorations, BUT we randomly wandered into an antique store yesterday. It's the kind where everything is donated and the proceeds go to charity. They had BEAUTIFUL depression-era colored glass bowls at $5-$10 each! I bought all 5 they had. Now I need 5-10 more for the centerpieces. In my defense, I really love decorative colored glass bowls. And these are very pretty.

Job-wise, I made it into May! That means I'm probably employed through June. I hope. Possibly.

Together, my FH and I decided that we will both be looking for jobs closer to one of our sets of families. It will be hard to leave some of the great things here, but it's just not possible for us to raise kids in this area. We simply don't make enough money to afford housing on one salary or quality day care on both salaries.

It's slightly too depressing to write out the savings. With the wedding in two weeks, we've been paying off our venders. It's a completely debt-free wedding, but those $1000+ checks hurt.

The good news is.... BOTH CARS ARE PAID!!!! Woo!!!! All the letters from nearby dealerships about how now that we own the cars, we can trade them in for new ones are being thrown in the trash. We're driving them into the ground.

Even better, I officially have a job until the next set of cuts in December. That's theoretically when the deal goes through to buy our company, so no one is making any sort of promises about what happens after that.

I also picked up a babysitting job for after the wedding. I feel kinda old for babysitting, but extra cash is extra cash. I don't actually think the person who offered me the job realizes how old i am. When we were fitting my fiance for his tux, they asked which prom we were attending...

Congratulations -- a debt-free wedding and two paid-off cars AND knowing how to fight productively! You guys are really getting off on the right foot together. Good for you!

Thanks, CecilyC!

I'm back now as Mrs.Kaitlyn! The wedding was awesome. There were a bunch of last minute expenses, of course, but the vast majority of our spending was conscious spending on what we wanted. And really, if we had had a limo, we would have missed the hilariousness of getting stuck behind a miniature pony pulling a little bitty cart (The joys of Amish country). Everything went so smoothly that the DOC I had really wanted would have been pointless anyway. Glad we saved that money.

We came in $3000 under budget. Woo! I was very excited to put that money back in the ING account, which has now been relabeled "emergency fund."

We're still hashing out what bank we will go with. Since we don't plan on staying in this area next year, switching to a local bank and then switching out seems like a waste of time. Easier to just add one of us to the other's primary account, but which one? I have BoA and he has Citi. Problems, problems.

Until then, I'm working on our new savings goals and coming up with a good budget that accounts for the "extra" money from no longer having car payments. Here's what I have so far:

Income: $6500/mo

Emergency fund 3 months expenses: $3000/$8000 37.5% complete
House downpayment fund: $0/$60,000. 0% complete (and likely to stay that way for a while...)

Rent: $1450
Car ins: $220 (this is still our unmarried rate. We anticipate it will go down)
Transportation: $100
Student loans: $420
Cable/internet: $100
Cell phones: $90
gas/electric: $250 (this is a very rough guess. Obviously it goes up and down all year)
Groceries: $350
Entertainment/dining out: $300
Taekwondo: $300
Individual play spending: $300 (so, $150 each that we aren't accountable for)

This leaves us with $2890/mo in savings/debt repayment.

I will probably split it $1000/mo into savings, the rest into student loan repayment.

I know what you are thinking: what happened to the money that came as wedding gifts? Some of it went to a desperately needed new laptop. The rest of it...Well, remember the cat that needed $1700 in surgery for her infected teeth? Now it seems she has a drug-resistant ear infection or something. She's currently on a round of REALLY STRONG antibiotics. If that doesn't work, she's going to need ear surgery. We find out next week. Sigh. So lucky she's adorable.

An extra job is great to have. Extra $$! Hey looking young is a great "problem" to have.

Congrats on getting married! Congrats on doing it debt free! Congrats on paying off the cars!

Hope the kitty gets better. Happy 4th of July week.

A quick update to say that I called the car insurance company to change my name and marital status. Even though we were already sharing a policy as domestic partners, changing it to married took $300 off our total policy. Woo! They didn't even need any of the paperwork to prove it. Easiest $300 saved ever. Unless you count the stress of getting married....

Congratulations Mrs. K! I have to roll my eyes at the insurance company, though. Talk about reverse social engineering.

Why bother adding one of you to the other's account, if it's only for a year? Why not just wait until you move? Or you could open an ING account together, I suppose...

I don't recall every saying 'Congratulations!!!' and I apologize for waiting so long. So many new changes, and so exciting. You're doing great! Keep up the good work.

Thanks peachy!



I fully agree that the insurance company is being silly. Nothing changed from domestic partners to married to really justify that much of a discount. Other girls I know in the same situation had no change, or had their rates increase. Makes me wish I had gone into actuarial science just to understand the math. Still happy about the savings, though!

We wanted to combine to joint accounts mostly for my own peace of mind/control issues. H has a lot of fabulous qualities, but personal finance just isn't one of them. Money will just sit in his checking account because transferring it to ING is too much of a hassle to him, so I end up not having the slightest idea how much real money we have. Asking him how much surplus money he has, or how much we have spent on dining out just gets me "well, we'll see after I pay my AmEx bill next month..." When I ask what last month's looked like? "Oh, I don't know. I just paid it." *strangles H* Now that we actually have enough money in our budget to make a dent in our student loans or drastically increase our savings, I want to make sure that it isn't money that just gets frittered away.

Yes, I am a financial control freak. I acknowledge this. It's why I wasn't allowed to know how much we spent on our HM until after.

There is also that H is up for a promotion. If he gets it and the company that buys my company doesn't relocate us too far away, we might stay. Moving and finding new jobs is a lot of work, and we don't really hate where we are. When I wrote out our post-car payments budget, I was really shocked to see how little we need to live on. One or the other of us just needs to make a bit more to live on just one salary, which was the main reason we want to move. It's important to us that someone be a stay at home parent when we finally decide to have kids.

This had been a financially interesting month.

The good: We received one of our reimbursement checks from the insurance company for the money we paid during our couples therapy. I think there's only one more month we need to fight them for. The ins. company has been fighting tooth and nail to keep from repaying us. Every month, we get notice a notice that we don't actually have insurance with them. H has to call them up and walk them through submitting the payment, get another letter stating it has been denied because we don't have insurance with them, rinse and repeat. I hate medical insurance companies so very, very much.

The bad: I may have gone slightly overboard celebrating not having to save for a wedding. Of course, my idea of "excessive spending" is going out for lunch once a week and buying a classic little black dress that was on sale for very cheap.

The ugly: Lucy's surgery was way more than expected. Way way way more. Bye bye all that money we saved up. We cancelled one of our planned city trips and postponed another one in order to make up for it, but boo. It makes me cry when I think of how much money we have spent on her, but that's the risk you take when you adopt a pet.