Dad’s Birthday and Finances
Dad turned 57 today. For his birthday, my sweetheart and I got him a book on Guinea hens, a set of John Wayne DVD’s, and we paid off his $465 bill at the feed store. It was a good birthday for him, and of course he teared up.
Afterwards, we found out the piece he took in to be prepared for his tractor was finished, and that the bill was over $600. As soon as I heard him say it, a big fat “Doh!” went off in the back of my brain, because I knew I’d have to be paying that too after just paying off the other huge bill this morning.
That’s a bit of a financial set-back, but I’m at least in a position with my finances now that I have some choices:
1. Place the balance on my credit card and pay it off gradually. My interest rate is 14.15%.
2. Take the money out of my emergency fund, which will put a big dent in it, but I’ll still have 4 figures in it to build back up on so it doesn’t leave me entirely helpless. It does however make it longer until I reach my $5k goal for my emergency fund.
3. Pay half of it with emergency fund money, and gradually pay the rest off. I get taxes back in March, which is usually another grand or so back. Though I had intended on putting this towards my car.
4. Use my Christmas Fund money towards it, which is about $550 right now. But that would take away the whole purpose behind the Christmas fund, which was to prevent me from having to worry about where I was going to get the money for gifts each holiday.
I’m thinking I will probably go with number 3. I may pay more than half, and pay the rest off gradually. I’ll replenish the emergency savings with my tax refund and my regular deposits each month. Afterall, this is what I started the emergency fund for, when I get in a financial bind. I just didn’t think tractor repair would be on the list of “emergencies”.
My cousin Steph also stopped by today, as she was in from Georgia with her newborn. I took tons of baby pictures for her and burned them to CD. She also dropped me off a small amount of genealogy information from my mothers side that I’ll work on researching and inputting into the family tree program.
I’ve purchased a new domain that will host a variety of my public projects, including my resume, a public blog I can share with family, etc. That way I can reserve Tawodi for more personal and spiritual type projects, and keep it away from my mother and most of my family. Most importantly is a site on the genealogy of my family that I want to make available.
I don’t intend to set anything up until after the new year, but we reserved the domain at least, and my sweetheart and I can start populating it with information.
This weekend I spent the day on Saturday up at Highland Farms participating in the annual Earthdance. I stayed out there till about 2am drumming and spending time with glorious people, then came home and crashed.
Otherwise things seem to be going fine.
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