I’ll confess I was feeling a bit complacent this week. Kent busted his butt and got all our budget stuff loaded into Microsoft Money Plus (it’s free, find details here from one of my favorite personal finance blogs) which is letting us track our budget pretty much in real time, we've tweaked and adjusted that budget so now it's really working for us, and we aren’t touching our savings (although they aren’t growing either alas).
You may recall we have an unfinished repair to flood damage in the foundation on the patio side of our apartment. We'd been calling around to various masons since April, but no one would return our calls, let alone come out and give us an estimate. We know it’s because our job is small potatoes to them; most of them have a lot of work right now from the damage all the brownstones across Boston sustained last March. So we asked our realtor for a recommendation, which he provided and he suggested mentioning his name. Wow did that ever work! We called Friday, the mason came out Tuesday and gave us the estimate yesterday—$3300. Gulp—we aren’t in Kansas anymore.
We do have the money, but replacing it will hurt. This is the nitty gritty party of budgeting, not the fun stuff. I’d much rather be considering spending that kind of cash on a super cool trip rather than on a house I dislike and can’t wait to sell.
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