Irregular Payments

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photo credit: Daveybot

Spring ends, summer begins, more debt goes to the great beyond. Isn’t it a wonderful thing?

Yet another month of incremental debt killing. While I could have boosted the damage done to the final tally a bit by using returns from my expanding online marketing side business, right now I’m comfortable using the funds to reinvest in what’s been working. Maybe next month I’ll throw the excess at the debt, but for now having the ability to use the play I have in that side business’s cash flow to experiment has proven useful.

Likewise, I’m sure we could have trimmed more, but going over our spending versus the budget it looks like we did a little comfort spending in June. In the end, it is just money, and we needed a little cheering up more than we needed to knock a couple hundred more off the total, so c’est la vie. Speaking of, we are still waiting to hear on medical bills associated with our loss. Since we have a pretty substantial deductible, unless medical procedures have gotten cheap all of a sudden, the ol’ total is almost certainly going to suffer a brief reversal soon.

Anyway, for those into specifics, here ya’ go:

photo credit: PhotoA.nl

Despite the ominous sounding headline I threw up there, the financial front of our little family ended the month making decent forward progress. Oh, sure, I would have loved to knock another few thousand a month off that total. And with our little stimulus payment (my apologies future generations!) coming in, I thought we might just have the chance to bite of a bigger chunk.

Some more good news: My little sis did manage to get herself hitched. To a guy I really like. And looked absolutely ecstatic the whole time. And while our gift spending was out of the ordinary monthly range, the wedding was no surprise and we had budgeted for that spending. So it made almost no dent finance-wise. And hey, it’s my little sister. I’m absolutely thrilled that she’s thrilled.

Looking good at knocking off that chunk so far! But alas, Murphy had other ideas. At least he had the good graces to wait to show up until we had a bit of extra coin around.

We’ve been working on growing our little family for several months without luck, until early last month when my wife shared a little good news with me one evening. Several visits to our wonderful doc later, and alas, it was not meant to be this time around. Whether at seven weeks or seven months, irregardless of how great anything else went, this type of loss makes for a rotten month.

Here’s to a better June!

Yet another reason to avoid giving out those gift cards that everyone seems to love:

photo credit: untitledprojects

Tens of millions of dollars in gift cards and certificates became worthless overnight in the wake of the Sharper Image’s financial plight — and customers holding those cards have little recourse.

Federal law allows a company to stop honoring store gift cards when it files Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and that’s exactly what’s happening at San Francisco-based Sharper Image. Sales clerks are telling customers they can no longer accept the plastic cards as payment, and the cards are no longer accepted when customers try to use them online.

Hope you didn’t wait too long to go out and grab your personal foot massager/fancy nose hair trimmer/overpriced adult games early!