Money Sucks!!

Here's something that probably sounds familiar to most of you and that is getting ahead only to fall back behind. I am talking about money of course. Megan and I recently went on a trip to Washington State to visit family. We used a portion of our tax return to pay for the trip. Roughly the trip cost $2000 with the plane tickets and expenses for our time there. Before we left I made sure to pay the bills - even paid a bit extra on most of them.

Sounds like we played it safe and I would agree. We even received and extra $850 for our roof which we than used to pay off our credit card. So back to zero right....WRONG! During our vacation Jazlynn had to be admitted to the hospital for pneumonia. I am sure we will be billed for something. Our three weeks in Washington cost a bit more than expected which than turned into $100 added to our credit card on arriving back to Midland for food and gas. Additionally, an extra payment of $165 had to be made to get our van back from the body shop (Almost the entire amount I made doing some work for my father while visiting). The thing that really ticks me off is that the $165 was the amount I needed to finish off my six months of car insurance. Funny thing is that isn't even the worst of it.

The day after we returned I noticed that the fence, which is probably 20 years old and rotted, finally bit the dust. Thank goodness the neighbor payed half but that still left us putting $400 on the credit card which was no less than 25 days free of debt...know $500 in the hole. Last thing, our dishwasher, which was in need of repairs, finally whore us down enough purchased a new one...another $550.

So my question is, do you ever get ahead in the battle with cash and credit? Or are we just meant to suffer with the costs of owning a home and trying to make it on your own two feet? Probably the latter!=(