The Morning After the Night Before

DH and I were up last night talking over Things. (Followed, naturally, by a 6:01 a.m. phone call from one of our banks to confirm that the letter I sent them had, in fact, been penned by me. Geeeeeez, for-why do we have a signature card?!?!…)

Pros and cons were discussed. Possibilities were gone over. Rants were had. Complaints were aired. There-there’s were uttered. A rather impressive amount of wine was consumed (Orovales Rioja 2004), and ultimately…a half-assed action plan was developed.

It starts with just hanging tight for this month. We just paid for the month of July at the older kids’ center anyway, and there being no school right now…eh. Don’t really want the two of them banging around the house being bored for the next five weeks.

But in August, they’re going back to school and we’re not going to pay for the after school care anymore. Saves us $850 a month right there. If it works, great! If not, well, I’m just going to have to give up the job. We can’t afford it, at that point.

The other thing is, I need to have more time to save money. There are a lot of things I’ve been doing that I don’t usually do, like buying a lot of our clothes at the mall instead of thrift stores, or paying a maid service to clean my house rather than doing it myself (I haven’t ‘needed’ them for quite a few weeks now…I just like having them do it…). That stuff needs to stop, PDQ. I need to be able to do this stuff during the day, during the week – a lot of my best frugal sources aren’t open into the night or on weekends. And vacuuming the house at 8:30 at night? Yeah, right.

So what I’m going to do is adjust my work schedule. We aren’t an 8-to-5 kind of company anyway; I’m putting myself on a split shift, with a large two to three hour lunch break, suitable for cruising thrift stores, ‘doing’ Costco and the meat market, and otherwise doing all the little tweaky things I’ve picked up over the years to trim dollars and cents off my budget.

Should make for an interesting quarter, anyway, huh?

Things are just never dull, around the Den…