Day 99: Another No-Spend Day*

Posted on | December 9, 2007 |

The weather’s yucky (freezing cold and a couple inches of new snow) and I woke up with a bad stomach-ache so we skipped church and just stayed home. Staying home definitely increases my chance of having a no-spend day though with the Internet and my credit cards at my finger-tips, it’s no guarantee.

The reason for the asterisk is that The Husband brought home some statements of bills he paid this past week. I entered the payments into my YNAB budget/register* so I feel I should report them here too.

Hospital — $183.70
We’re guessing that the reason the insurance company paid such a small part of this bill is because we have not yet met our annual deductible (I would hope not since we started coverage on October 1 of this year). This bill was just for the “fine needle aspiration with image guidance” (read: biopsy) that they did on my poor, sick thyroid gland last month.

I really don’t want to see what our portion of the rest of the bills from that same procedure will look like. Naturally, the radiologist will send his own bill, and the Dr. who read the films, the nurse who prepped me for the biopsy, the pathologist who checked the samples (and kept sending the Dr. in for another, better sample — did I mention they had to restick me 6 times! and silly me, I had chosen to forego the local), the nurse who walked me from radiology to the biopsy room, the assistant who checked the paperwork, the clerk who checked all of my insurance coverage and put that stupid band on my wrist (that’s got to be an expensive task, right?), and probably, the janitor who cleaned up after the procedure. Maybe his uncle too, just because.

Farmers — $387.40
Six month’s full-coverage insurance on The Tank. We saved $14.50 by paying the bill in full instead of opting for the two-payment option. Gotta just love a man who’s on the ball and has cash tucked away for all these annoying little bills, huh?

Now that I’ve seen the insurance bills for both vehicles (here’s where we paid to insure the Impreza), I was able to calculate exactly how much to budget each month in our car insurance category — $148.45. I’m excited to be making progress with getting the full budget picture and heading into the new year with the promise of a new, clean, accurate YNAB budget* in place.

Comcast — $60.59
Gone are the lower bills of the last two months — they originally charged us for two service calls that should have both been N/C (free). I called customer service right away and they agreed to take both charges off in the form of a credit on the next month’s bill. But true to Comcast-form, only one charge was credited so I had to go through the same rigamarole to get the second charge off the following month’s bill. Anyway, the past two months’ bills have been almost $20 lower due to those credits. This month’s bill is the full ugly. It covers basic cable (because without it we’d get no reception at all up here) and high-speed Internet (which, in all honestly, would be the very last luxury I’d get rid of if I had to tighten up my budget).

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