Love how a bulk of your memories here are for helping OTHER people!! What a generous and sweet person you are!!

And if $5.00 was the worst stupid tax you had all year, I’d consider that a win :)

Here’s to another year of giving and enjoying our $$$!

Haha, sounds about right ;)

Part of me thinks my wife just wants me to get one so she can drive the Lexus!! I’ll be the one who inherits the minivan as my new daily driver!

Oooh good to know, thank you!! Smack in the middle of car shopping myself and will need to check both out!

That trip sounds amazing :)

Best purchase for someone else: $12.17 to buy a six pack of a beer my sister liked when she was here that she can’t get at home

Saddest and most important purchase: $250 for half my partner’s plane ticket to be there when my grandpa died. (My parents paid for my ticket, my grandma paid for half of my partner’s. Extremely grateful to them.)

Second most important purchase: $800 to my partner’s mom for a big expense she had. She ‘lent’ us money when we needed it and wouldn’t let us pay her back, so we did it this way.

Most expensive purchase: about $1050 all told for my Big Comfy Couch. It was stressful not in a ‘fight the store’ way, but because I’d gotten so used to its tiny predecessor I spent the day after it was delivered freaking out that it was too big! (It’s not.)

Most predictable ‘Me’ purchase: $21.33 for notebooks to use for journals. Every year at school supply time I buy all the Five Stars I like.

Best ‘Me’ purchase: $59.99 for my figure skating streaming subscription

Best ‘us’ purchase: $29 for campground reservations at a campground on a river. The Adirondack night sky was glorious.

Stupid Tax: $5 for an out-of-state fee on the above reservation. Would not be stupid if I was from out of state, but I’m NOT, in fact, from out of state, I just didn’t pay attention and let my old address autofill in the online form. Sigh.

Best “unplanned for” expense: a new-to-me Smart ForTwo! My 5-year-old Nissan Cube rolled 100k miles and things immediately started breaking. I’d been wanting another Smart for a long time (I had to trade in my last one for the Nissan when I needed to start hauling my mother-in-law around and her wheelchair didn’t fit).

I figured it would take time to find a used Smart with low miles in the color I wanted but instead it took all of 2 or 3 days – we checked all the online auto sites and ended up getting it through TrueCar.com. I paid $9,995 for a 2016 model with only 17,000 miles on it and it’s in perfect condition. I love it – it’s so much fun to drive and the gas mileage is great!

Bonus: I sold my Nissan to Carvana and got an excellent price of $3199 for it, even though it had so many miles and some hail damage. Both Carvana and TrueCar were excellent to deal with – I will never buy another car through a standard dealership again!

Congrats on the big changes going on!! A move AND an engagement – nice, man!! You’ll have to let me know what you think of Cali after a year or so. I did the opposite years ago and moved from there to the DC area :) Still prefer CA environment-wise, but all my friends and family now live on this coast so would be hard to move away from that…

Going now to google “Rimowa Suitcase ” haha… that’s a lot of dough!!

Very good info – thank you!! Can’t believe that vet stay cost $3,000!! Sucks having another “person” to watch out for/care for, but I agree so far that the love and happiness they bring far outweighs it :) Just so long as they live a nice long life! Haha…

$3300 Move to San Diego – My fiance and I moved from Arlington, VA. Giving the west a try.
$2300 Engagement Ring – Got engaged and in the process of figuring out wedding plans. Luckily her parents are paying for it. ($10k max)
$1024 – iPhone 11 Max – Got kicked off my parents plan, so sold my iphone 7 and switched to visible.
$950 Tooth Implant body (still dreading the next step) – Wasn’t a fan of this process, but suffered a bad tooth.
$900 Rimowa Suitcase – Splurge spend…not sure why I bought this.
$650 Las Vegas Trip

$9124 was the total for the year. I would like to get my investments up around $100k since I’m approaching 30 quickly and would also like to purchase a house in the next 2 years.

But that brings me to my second best purchase, Healthy Paws pet insurance. We didn’t have it for our 2 older dogs and they’ve drained our sinking funds on more than one occasion, but I always thought of pet insurance as a scam. The extra vet expenses in Cosmo’s first month made me reconsider and do some research. I went ahead and signed him up since you just never know with puppies and within 2 months it paid for itself multiple times over. Cosmo had a stomach blockage (he chews/eats everything) that required a hospital stay. Thankfully no surgery, but still rang up to the tune of $3000. Healthy Paws reimbursed me almost 90%. I had to pay the deductible and the doctor visit fees, but the rest was covered.

Depending on your dog’s behavior and exposure to other animals I’d highly recommend it while she’s still young and relatively cheap (we pay $25/month for Cosmo). Our older dog would probably be cost prohibitive to insure but my experience has been the biggest costs were the first couple years of life (we’ve dealt with Parvo, distemper, worms, and more). We haven’t had any rate increases yet so I’m not sure the cost is worth it long term, but it definitely saved us a small fortune already.