A Note on the Money Hemorrhaging From My Life

After yesterday's brush with death I finally got around to paying the bills to see what $740 in car repairs was going to mean to me. (Don't even tell me that investing $740 in repairs into a 1994 Honda Civic is a bad idea. All the better ideas take too much effort.) I paid off the credit cards on which I had put my recent purchases of new toys and then decided to reconcile "the box." Around here we deal with shared bills by the "I'll pay the phone bill, and you'll pay the cable" method and after paying the bill put the statement in the box. (Would a joint account to pay the bills make more sense? Yes, it would.) Every few months we go through the box to make sure everything is fair. The box hadn't been reconciled since January; the single largest monthly expense here is the gas-electric bill -- which I don't pay. After totalling up everything and calculating my share, I owe about $650 for the utilities.

Probably this means that I should not use the upcoming Sales Tax Holiday as an excuse to buy a lot of new clothes for back-to-school.

Perhaps I should actually do something about my plans to start an upscale and overpriced tutoring service ("now accepting a limited number of clients") for the high-school-aged children of Helicopter Parents.