Is the month over already? Time to think about christmas

The month as just blown by. I've been working everyday, 12 hours a day. I've worked 18 days in a row so far. These extra hours will may some really good pay checks. We needed the extra money to fix my car and buy material to finish the outside of our house.

A few days ago, we decided to do our Christmas budget, so I asked my wife put one together. I suggested we try something different this year. We have twice as many people to buy for on my side of the family than my wife's side. I have 3 Christmas's on my side, and my wife just has 1 Christmas on her side. So I suggested to wife, that we should spend the same amount of money on each side of the family. It didn't seem fair to have to always spend more money on my side of the family. We didn't budget any money for me and my wife to get each other anything. Maybe when we get out of debt, we will get each other Christmas presents.

After making out our budget for Christmas, we realized our gift money is going to be short. We have been saving the same amount of money each month to our gift fund. It has worked well for all the birthdays we give presents toward. But it seems like we needed to save a little bit more each month. We will probably adjust it a little and hope we come out better next year. For this year we decided to add some of our extra money this month into our gift fund.

Also we had enough extra at the end of the month to pay an extra payment of $1030.00 on our debt.

Another 84 hour week

Just finished another 84 hour week. This is starting to take a toll on me. I am stressed out and tired. Hopefully I have less than a week left of these long hours. I have a week of vacation in 2 weeks, I can't wait for a week off.

Working hard.

I just finished working an 84 hour week. I am working seven days a week and 12 hours a day for a 2 week period, maybe longer. This is good considering it cost nearly $600 for my car to get fixed. It was in worse shape than I thought. But now it seems to drives real smooth.

The extra money is good, but I don't have much time at home, when I work this many hours. I'm looking forward to when I get a day off. But I'm looking forward to the day I get out of debt, even more.

Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong

I week ago my car started sounding horrible. It seems to have a bad wheel bearing on the passenger side front. At least I hope is just a wheel bearing. My car will finally go to the local auto shop in a few days. Luckily we have a third vehicle. Its an 18 year old truck that we just for hauling stuff.

I got in the truck to go to work and it seems to be not firing on one cylinder. The truck shakes pretty good whens it idling and has kind of a chugging sound. It probably needs new spark plugs, and a distributor cap. But I've been driving it everyday anyway. We have some money saved for auto repairs but probably not enough to cover both vehicles.

Last weekend we used the holiday weekend to work on our house. We started putting on the siding on the back of the house. The siding has been in the garage since last summer, when we put the siding on the other sides of the house. We were able to get the siding up to the second floor. I was pretty happy with what we got done. Afterwards we measured the rest of the area left to cover. It was around 800 square feet, and we only have about 570 square feet left. We are going to have to order some more siding. I really want to have the outside of the house done before winter.

So these are expenses that we are going to have to try to fit in our budget. We should be able to do it without a problem. But I'm not sure it we'll have much extra for paying on our debt.