We are trying to stay on top of our finances, part of that includes planning for our unusual spending each month.

Honestly, there isn’t a lot going on in November. We have our son’s 20^th birthday, The Charles Dickens Christmas Faire, and Christmas to plan and pay for.

For our son’s birthday, he always chooses meals made at home over going out to dinner. We will have very minimal ingredients to buy because we almost always have all the ingredients on hand for his choice. He has chosen cookies for his dessert this year and we have everything for that too. We have a couple small gifts and only need to buy his “big” gift. It's going to be expensive this year. He wants to be a welder and he picked a $600 welding helmet from Snap-On. He was going to buy it for himself, but one of our friends (who works for the county) said he can order things at a big discount. Our friend ordered it for him and the total is $380. It's expensive, but well worth it for his career and eye sight. We have chosen to buy this for him for his birthday. He was all set to pay for it and when we told him we would like to get it for him for his birthday, you should have seen his eyes light up. We have been saving up for some expensive purchases for our kids. (We also paid for half of his welder, which we had been saving for for several weeks. This has depleted out kids and school fund so we will need to keep saving as we are going to pay for half of our daughter's computer for personal training.) For our November budget, I added extra money into our “kids” category to cover these purchases. Now, we need to save, save, save over the next several pay periods so we can do the same for our daughter.

The Charles Dickens Christmas Faire is held in the Cow Palace every year and we have gone on Black Friday every year since we got married. The ticket prices have definitely increased. For our family of 5 (including my mom), tickets were $185… and this was the early ticket price. Normal ticket price would have been $230. We purchased the tickets the same night I won in BINGO and we used part of my BINGO winnings to pay for it. We will still need to pay for food and gifts/souvenirs while we are there, but that will come out of our food and Christmas envelopes, respectively.  Those budgets have been adjusted accordingly for November.

Lastly, Christmas… We finish up a lot of our Christmas shopping in November. We have been putting money aside all year and used it as we needed it, but in November we are usually putting the finishing touches on our gifting. We are doing very well this year and just need a few things here and there. Our Christmas sinking fund should cover it.

I am feeling like we are in pretty good shape heading into November and just need to keep paying attention to our finances to make sure they don’t get away from us and we don’t overspend in any areas. 

Our credit card balance is (slowly) going down and our saving balance is (slowly) going up. I feel like we are under control heading into the holidays, which is good because this is usually when we overspend.