All Work and No Play

All Work and No Play Makes…

Makes me irresponsible
Makes me feel guilty
Makes my children sad

We planned a vacation for Disney this spring. We had planned to take a small chunk from our tax return to pay for this vacation. But as the check is significantly more than we expected we have a lot of thinking to do. We could pay off most of our debt. We have a significant amount of medical bills (now I know how people are ruined financially by medical bills) So in interest of full disclosure our tax return this year will be $10,000. Writing/seeing that number feels wrong. Feels like it’s too much, like somehow our taxes had been done wrong (I trust they were not, as she showed us the break down). We have 4 debts on top of medical bills right now. It looks something like this:

$2100 in medical bills
$9700 for Todd’s truck
$3700 for an ATV (never again will I go into debt for fun)
$3300 for one credit card (1)
$3300 for one credit card (2)
$1500 for vacation

We would like to put some into savings, so that if an unexpected emergency comes up we don’t have to go back into debt to survive it. My problem lies in the I know financially we would be better off to skip vacation altogether and pay off debt and set up an emergency fund. But for the sake of family sanity I know we need it. The boys have talked about it since we decided to go in November. I want to be medical debt free (those bills are important to me). So what I’d like to do is pay off medical bills (2100), put aside vacation money and a savings (total $2300), leaving $5600 to mess around with. Obviously the ATV has a lower interest rate than the credit cards so we could split that and put $2800 on each credit card or pay one off and put $2300 on the other leaving only $1000 to pay off. In the grand scheme of things this makes the most sense. My family hasn’t been on vacation since we went in 2008 to Cedar Point for a week…we need this. I want this for them. So I guess the break down will look like this:

10,000 tax return
1,500 vacation
800 savings
2,100 medical bills
3,300 credit card
- 2,300 credit card
-------------------
$0 total

Dave Ram.sey said to budget every penny and be flexible. I’ve got the budget every penny part but being flexible is not my greatest quality. But I’m definitely working on it!