July 2016 Update

Greetings!

Things are coming along fine, though August will be a ... well, let's call it a spendy month. The hubs and I are going on our second annual vacation road trip next month, taking in lots of New England with (hopefully) a dash of Canada. We discovered during our honeymoon last year that we prefer to wander from place to place than book lots of stuff in advance. This way, if we really like a place, we can stay a day or two longer. Sure, the risk is that we won't find accommodations, but so far that hasn't happened.

We've done several trips this way, the first one by accident. We'd booked seven days in Santa Domingo, Dominican Republic, only to discover that it wasn't worth being there for even three days, much less seven. Unfortunately, our hotel had been prepaid, so we basically paid twice for the same week, as we got the hell out of SD and headed to a few resorts. Building on that knowledge, when we decided to do a road trip through California for our honeymoon, we booked only three hotels in advance -- the one for our arrival stay in San Diego, the one for our side trip to Vegas (baby!), and the one for our final city, San Francisco. We did the same thing when we went to Costa Rica earlier this year. You can talk to locals to find out what the good places are and plan accordingly. We've discovered some gems doing it like this.

Anyway, back to the money part of all this: There will be vacation spending. Granted, it will be mostly for my share of our accommodations and gas, as I tend not to shop much on vacation. I usually try to find something that will remind me of our trip, but it has to really speak to me, otherwise I pass.

Also coming up is my last class in GMU's professional writing graduate certificate program, so I have tuition coming up for that. I've been taking advantage of employer assistance, since the program qualifies, but I still have to pay it before I can get reimbursed. Grrr.

The updated figures are over there on the right. I'm especially pleased with the savings amount. Woot woot!