$1,100 Later

As the old saying goes; easy come, easy go. But when I think about it I always think this saying doesn't quite have it exactly right. I mean, the easy go part is right. It's easy to spend money. It is much harder to make it.

Either way, spending is sometimes a necessary part of life even as I rail so hard on the idea of saving and investing.

I guess it would be one thing if today's expenses were frivolous ones. But they weren't. All were necessary and so I guess that makes it okay even if the amount spent today comes close to $1,200 when all is said and done.

The biggest expense was replacing our old stove, which has a burned out burner and major cracks along the ceramic cooktop.

I should add that we decided to go back to gas, and had to have a gas line installed a couple of weeks ago that cost around $300 to get completed. But it will be worth it. I will never use electric again, and even if I did I would never return to a ceramic cooktop.

The new gas stove with delivery and connection, plus removal of our old stove, ran us about $900.

This actually worked out well, I think, since I budgeted for $1,000 all said.

In a way there was more savings as well. We happen to live on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River and got our stove on the Missouri side in St. Charles, a suburb of St. Louis for anyone curious.

For one, because the stove is being delivered to Illinois, the appliance center did not charge us Missouri sales tax. In the state of Missouri they are not required to do so if the product sold is being moved out of state for delivery. Because sales tax in that part of Missouri is around 8%, we saved about $72.

Plus, I had about a quarter of a tank of gas in my truck, so I decided to fill it up on the Missouri side as well where gas is 50 cents cheaper per gallon. Gas in Illinois is around $3.39 per gallon and gas in Missouri is around $2.89 per gallon. I needed roughly 17 gallons to get to a full tank, and so this saved us around $8.50.

Granted, with the round trip I probably burned about 5 gallons of gas. But we still saved overall, and we had to go out that way anyway. Cost of the trip in gas? About $14.45.

We also decided, for whatever reason, to do our regular shopping over on the Missouri side as well. We were there, so what the heck? We spent another $51.19 at Aldi on food, and $73.43 at Walmart for incidentals.

When we are out and about we do not often stop to get something to eat. But because we were roughly about 45 minutes from home, we decided to stop and get a little bit of lunch out.

We stopped at Panda Express and spent around $16 on lunch.

I'd call this a pretty expensive day, but again, it was not like we were not spending on things we need and will use.

The grand total spent for the day on this fine Saturday? About $1,094. We can adjust that up to $1,109 if I account for the gas we burned on the trip doing all of this.

Luckily we took from savings and did not have to use credit to do any of this, as is typically our plan of attack when it comes to any spending. But still, I will want to do whatever I can to eventually put it all back. I have ideas and plans in place to do just that.

After all, I recently explained one of the ways that we do this in a previous article where I talked about using other people's money. You didn't think I actually intended on actually paying for any of this myself did you?

In any event, onward and upward, and I will see you on the other side. My thanks in advance for letting me deviate a little bit from my norm and just write an article that just shares a little part of my day today.

Lead image courtesy of Pixabay, user stevepb. Shopping Spending Till Slip - Free photo on Pixabay