I screwed up :( Or, How NOT to be frugal...Lesson #1

Not intentionally, but I made a major goof this past week. I pay pretty much all of my bills online, and I have a spreadsheet that I use to keep track of what I paid, how much, and when. Apparently I must have gotten distracted while paying bills last time, and though I marked that I paid a couple of items, I either did not copy down the confirmation numbers, or something happened and my file did not save properly. As usual, I checked my bank account, and could not find record of my payments clearing (because they usually don't take more than a day or two to clear), checked the websites I used to pay these items, and nothing was showing up...so what did I do? Yep, I paid them again. Imagine how horrified I was to check the bank a day or so later to find 2 sets of double charges to my account to the tune of about $240!!! This in turn did cause me to go into overdraft to the tune of $30 in fees. Thank God it was only that one item though...otherwise it could have been drastically different. Unfortunately because I was not expecting to pay an extra $240 in bills, I have had to do some scrounging around and making changes to what is getting paid and when. We should be all caught up by next pay period, and nothing will be paid late, but it still irks me. Also to add to this, DH needed new glasses and unfortunately he couldn't wait. So there is another $300 that I will have to pay off. *sigh* We did try Zenni Optical online for his last set, and while we liked the look and the price, we found out that they could not be repaired. The screws that they used rusted and no place we tried could get them out :( Plus, DH's prescription is really strong, so it takes more than 3 weeks to get them because they have to have them made specially..and he couldn't wait that long due to the drastic change in his prescription.

Now, I do have a bit of good news in all of this. Rather unexpectedly, a loan that I thought we still had to pay on for another year was paid off in December. I had called the bank to find out if they had received my payment (another one of those missing payments I was checking into), only to be told that our check had either been returned to the bank it was issued from, or they had shredded it, because our account was paid in full! So that is $200 more a month that I can use. My plan is to give myself an extra $50 which goes towards gas, food, all those extras that come with having kids in school, etc. $25 will go to DH for some hobby plane of his that he wants to build, and the extra $125 will go to savings. I would love to put it towards bills, but as we currently have NO savings, I would feel much better getting that started. As the bills get paid down/off, I can split more between the two.