The Blade is Dulled, but the Battle is not Over! Fight, Ronin, Fight!

Why we didn't win.

First off, I will casually confess I'm somewhat of a defeatist. I typically look on the worst side of things and my outlook is more than occasionally grim. This is regularly vexing to my better half, the Budget Naginata.

When I get overwhelmed by something, I typically quit. No, it's not very sportsmanlike of me and no, it doesn't really solve anything. I admit all of these things. This is also the undergirding reason why I haven't been posting since the beginning of the year. Things have not been well and I didn't really want to just sit here and write one depressing post after another.

"Yes we spent money. Yes we ate out crappy food. Yes we bought nonsensical goods that don't better us as a financially independent entity."

I wasn't in the mood to do that, so I avoided it.

... so here we are. One year later. (Truth be told, it's one year and four days later, but we set May 1st to be the cutoff date, so there we go).

In the broadest sense of the contest, we totally lost. We have spent money on things that were unessential to us and we have plans to expand that in the coming months. I'm not going to break it down to you in dollars and cents, but it's enough.

So normally here is where I would shut down, lower my head and kick at the dirt a bit.

As I geared myself up to write this, however, that not everything is completely horrible. We did accomplish some pretty decent stuff over the past 12 months:

1. We finished paying off our Budget-Mobile, which makes it completely ours and saves us a bundle each month on payments.
   
   
2. We finished our credit card repayment program. This saves us even more than the car and frees up even more money.
   
   
3. We reconditioned an outstanding school loan and put us in good standing with the institution. Yes, we still owe a boatload on that, but we now can forebear during lean months, whereas before we didn't have that option.
   
   
4. Now that we have some money freed up, I started auto-drafting some money into a savings account. It's not much, but it's a good start.
   
   
5. We have used our tax refund this year to make some vital improvements/repairs to our house. We are close to a position to sell our "starter home" and possibly move into a better place closer to where both Budget Naginata and I work. It may mean a bigger house payment, but what we would save in time and gasoline should more than offset that. Should this occur, we'll also most likely eliminate a small equity loan that we had to take out to make some repairs after the first year we lived in the house.
   
   
6. The upcoming stimulus package will fix some broken things on the Budget-Mobile. We're very excited about having it in great working order.

These are some pretty significant things to happen that impact our financial standing. These are things I should not discount when I think of all the other things that have happened to us. The Budget-Clan is still dealing with a family medical issue that requires us to buy several extra tanks of gas over the course of a month and we all know that's not getting any cheaper. We are also still trying to make some final upgrades to the house to get in selling order and that requires more money. The Budget-Truck has remained unmoved for months due to a faulty starter (we think) and we have not had the money or opportunity to get that fixed.

Seriously, I could go on. Things are better in many ways, but we have a whole array of new problems. This, as I understand it, is what life is like.

I was going to ramble more... but I think I will save that until May-Day.