Day 114

"I get by with a little help from my friends."  -Ringo Starr

I'm sure Ringo included family in that.

26. Get 4 digits in our savings account

26. Get 4 digits in our savings account

This is one of the harder posts for me to write, because I'm pretty private about money.  However, I'm chronicalling my goals, and finances are part of those goals, so here goes.

Every year my mom's side of the family has a pre-Christmas celebration, usually about a week before Christmas.  We eat pizza and open gifts.  Although we always spent every Christmas with my mom's parents (we spent Christmas Eve with my dad's family), when my uncle got married splitting the holidays became a little more difficult.  Hence, the pre-Christmas celebration.  Chances are no one else was asking you to celebrate with them a week before.  We had our annual pre-Christmas celebration last night, and on top of generously giving us the bedsheets we asked for, my grandparents gave us a rather generous check.  Seems Patty decided she wanted to pay for Trevor and Darcy's kennelling... and then some.

Have I mentioned recently how awesome my grandmother is?  Because she's awesome.  This might be a good time to mention that she was also the person who took me to get my navel pierced.

But a little more on why it took so long to get here (because just now crossing this off is a little embarrassing).  Rewind to June... massive, massive car problems.  All our savings went to that.  Fast forward to about October.  I was looking at our savings account and realized that at our current savings rate, we'd get 4 digits by the beginning of November.  However, a good part of that was the money I was saving for John's birthday gift (I decided that since I was saving so long for it, I might as well earn interest on the money).  Once I took that money out, we'd be under 4 digits again.  So John and I talked about it, and decided that the money in our savings account only counted towards this goal if we had no intentions of spending it in the next 12 months.

So in other words, I could have (and I'm making up numbers here) $1500 in savings, but if $200 is marked towards a gift and $350 is marked towards a future vacation, only $950 would count towards the goal.  Thus, the money I've been putting aside for our 2012 vacation (to be booked in mid to late 2011) didn't count towards the goal, either.

But let me just say, it's a huge weight off my shoulders to be able to cross off the first financial goal on my list.

Oh and PS... people are getting their Christmas cards :)  WIN.