Emergency Fund: Ding!

Turns out I outsmarted myself at tax return time by setting up my refund to be direct deposited straight into our emergency fund at HSBC. My refund was deposited on Friday which brought our total to $9950 and change. I couldn't bear to see us $50 away from our goal, but cash flow in the checking account was too tight for me to fix that. Seriously.

It hit me last night...the reason cash feels so tight is that my company is "borrowing" about $1600 from me (un-reimbursed business expenses...the bulk of that going back to the first week of December) and I had begun a balance shuffling process to consolidate those expenses on one low rate card that I had yet to complete. When the dust settled from the rest of moving money around, the checking account once again looked healthy. My minimum payments (out of pocket...ugh) will be smaller and the interest that my company will have to reimburse will be a smaller amount. Win-win I suppose.

But the net effect is that I was able to transfer in the final $50 so that we have officially met our emergency fund goal, and technically ahead of schedule. w00t!

But honestly we are feeling some savings fatigue so I better take Singlema's advice and celebrate by spending a *little* so we don't feel so pinched. So we're going to splurge a bit while on vacation in San Francisco. Nothing too crazy mind you...just maybe a meal or two to write home about. Oh, and we thought we might pick up the stuff we need to start playing DDR. You know...for the exercise. Ahem.

Now we have to decide where to park that money....

Tags:

• savings