Evolving Personal Finance » Entries tagged with "Christmas"
December 2016 Budget Report
Our major event this month was traveling over winter break. We stayed with my parents for about 10 days. Most of the time we were just spending time at home with my family, as DPR was all the entertainment we needed. My siblings hadn’t met DPR before so that was very exciting. Traveling for that period threw off our spending in a couple ways: we mooched off my parents for food so our grocery and restaurant … Read entire article »
Filed under: month in review
December 2015 Budget Report
We took an extra long Christmas break this year because we skipped out on traveling for Thanksgiving. Kyle used up all but one of his vacation days! We spent several days up through Christmas Eve with Kyle’s family in California, took a Christmas morning red-eye, then spent Christmas and several days following with my family in Virginia, and returned to Seattle for New Years Eve. The month was fairly normal spending-wise except for the 11 … Read entire article »
Filed under: month in review
December 2014 Money Puddle and Spending Report
December is always a crazy month between gifts, travel, and socializing, and this year was no exception. We spent two full weeks in California with Kyle’s parents in December, which obviously threw off our food and transportation spending quite a bit. Right before the end of our visit, we both got sick – me with a stomach bug and Kyle with a head cold. My stomach bug caused us to do some ‘emergency’ spending that … Read entire article »
Filed under: month in review
Awesome Comments and Posts 6-19Dec 2014
Winter break started early for us this year – we have already been in California for a few days! It’s been a working vacation so far as Kyle had to negotiate a few remote work days to be able to leave town so early, and of course my funemployment ‘work’ follows me everywhere (and I enjoy it!). The last two weeks have consisted of holiday parties, basketball games, discussions about my PhD PF talks, some volunteering, and … Read entire article »
Filed under: weekly update
December 2013 Month in Review: Money
Given that this was December, we actually had a pretty normal spending month. We bought all of our Christmas presents, but the cost was reimbursed out of our Travel and Personal Gifts account, as was our spending on gas to get to my parents’ house for the holidays. Our discretionary spending was remarkably close to 100% across all five categories. We had an unusual number of miscellaneous purchases this month, but they were all fairly … Read entire article »
Filed under: month in review
Favorite Posts, Mentions, and Top Comments Week of 22December2013
As I told you last week, we drove to my parents’ place on Sunday for our Christmas break. Since then, we’ve been: spending time with family cooking hanging out with friends reading (I’m working on Gulp by Mary Roach, but I have two more books to get to after that!) watching movies (47 Ronin and Elysium, and some older ones) and Modern Family napping helping my mom with some of her errands One of the errands we helped with was taking, touching up, … Read entire article »
Filed under: weekly update
Christmas 2013 Recap
It seems that every year Kyle and I try a slightly different approach to Christmas gifts shopping, but our choices this year didn’t work out so amazingly. (I’m still waiting for my giving revolution, y’all.) The first year we were married, 2010, was a disaster because we spent way too much money and made the whole event stressful. In 2011, we instituted a per-person spending cap that was very successful in keeping the whole affair … Read entire article »
December 2012 Month in Review: Money
I found tracking and budgeting very difficult this month – it was the combination of lots of spending on Christmas gifts and that we were traveling for over 1/3 of the month. Sticking to our discretionary budget was nearly a lost cause and not even our targeted savings accounts could save us completely! Zeroing-out-wise, it turns out that you can’t spend $460.34 on cell phones in a month (on a budget of $95) and expect … Read entire article »
Filed under: month in review
Weekly Update 44
Kyle and I flew to California this week for our Christmas vacation! We had two normal days at work, then drove to northern Virginia on Tuesday evening and flew out early Wednesday morning. Since then we’ve been hanging out with Kyle’s parents and seeing our friends from college. I’m so glad all our shopping is done and we just have to wrap the presents that arrive every day and make peanut butter balls to add … Read entire article »
Filed under: weekly update
Zillions of Gifts, on a Budget
Kyle and I finished our Christmas shopping this past weekend! Well, we essentially started and finished it this weekend so it went pretty fast. Giving gifts to only long-distance recipients is a double-edged sword – we have to shop online and early so that there is time for shipping, which goes against our procrastinating nature, but that means the shopping is done well in advance of Christmas and that reduces the stress! (“Well in advance” … Read entire article »
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