Well, May was not a great month here.

In the grand scheme of things, wasn't the worst. Our net worth went up $1300. From our current setup I am unclear where the $1300 came from. About $250 mortgage paydown, and the rest is probably divided between retirement and short-term savings. Probably mostly retirement. Have been saving $800/month for short-term expenses, but had a lot of dental bills and insurance to pay, so was probably a wash. Was a good investment month and I accrued $500 employer match, so that makes up most of our net worth increase. Dissapointed that little of it was actually money saved.

Investments are up 7.50% as a whole (cash and all). Not bad, but the year is young. Anything can happen.

Glancing at the budget and the credit card - oy vey. Lord knows why but the credit card has like $1900 charges. Our budget is more like $1200, but we splurged a bit and had some expenses from last month pop up late, which explains $200 or so of the excess. Groceries look okay, but gas is over $100 because I insisted on driving the van 2 times to san jose, mostly. The good is all we have planned in June is the LA trip but we'll take dh's car - it will hardly put a dent in the budget. Oh plus $100 extra we spent since our preschool bill was low. So a $1500 bill would probably be in a good range, but we are over $400 still. Well $100 is the gas. $100 dining out - we had our date out saturday and we treated our parents a couple of weeks back (long overdue). Still $200 over. Minus $130 to the dentist. LEaves $70 over budget still unaccounted for. In addition to our gift budget for the month, dh bought some birthday gifts for the kids, and he went rock climbing twice. & that pretty much narrows it down. Plus I prepaid the diaper service to up the rewards on my card. So we probably had a little room for the last stuff all else being equal. But all the eating out, dental bill, and the overage on gas pretty much reamed us this month. Oh well, it was a nice month.

I decided not to put any money into long-term savings last month with the $850 car repair, and the same this month with dentist (Expected it to be more) and cruise and all that stuff. So with that we will probably squeak by. But, um, I think it will leave much less money to splurge on our cruise overall. We have been having it way to good. June is going to have to be a little more low key!

Anyway, I don't mind relaxing a bit with a lot of unexpected/one-time expenses, and definitely wanted to get out a little more and enjoy since work was (supposed to be anyway) less busy. But on the flip side I don't want to get into the habit of being $500 or over budget every month. Not pretty. So we have work to do.

Not to fear since I intend to work this weekend and put in some overtime next week. I am just so swamped there is no denying it any more. I know dh will flip out, but I have to work this weekend. I figured if I squeezed in 10 hours overtime was a good $250 take-home, so I will work on some overtime this month and will still be able to make some long-term savings contributions for the month. Even if I don't get it for a while. Might as well take advantage since it is so busy anyway. 5 hours a week will make up the shortfall and let us add $500 to savings for June. It is just up to my boss if he wants to pay it out sooner or wait to christmas, but either way is fine with me. Will get it eventually and straight to savings.

Well, that pretty much sums up my month. Can't say we have any plans for June. So we'll keep it low key. Well, we'll try anyway. May was just a month of enjoying luxuries we usually can't, and it is time to get back to reality!

On the other hand, we have already made significant progress on our net worth this year. 1/2 way to our net worth goal, and it is only May 31.

It's been baby steps here. I wanted to get our short-term savings squared away (no prob at all here) and then I wanted to pay off the car and get our savings up to 3 months expenses. So so close ($1300 away on the efund?). Then do the ROTH conversions. I just wanted to clean up everything so that by the end of the year we should be starting to put 10% to retirement consistently. & then save my next raise, as my goal is 15% retirement. We are getting so close to all of this. So it's like I am not too worried about retirement right now, but at the same time taking steps to get it back up to par. & I guess the fact I am getting $500/month anyway from my boss makes it a lot easier to put it on the back burner. I was just thinking I have often put retirement on the back burner for other goals BUT I have always either had 10% from my check or a 10% match. I guess to me that is just not trying very hard so I don't count it or something. LOL. So it sounds way worse than it is. But I just want to get to the point on 1-income where we can pay all our bills, have ample savings, and contribute 15% to retirement. Really it's all I want, and we are getting so close I can almost taste it! Of course I honestly only expect to get up to 8% or so in 2008, but it depends on my pay raise. Getting there slowly but surely... 10% is okay but 15% is what I really want to aim for, for the long-term.