My husband works on cars for a living. At any given time we have at least twice as many cars as what we probably should. Because he's also paranoid, we insure all of them.

When we split the household bills eons ago, I took on the duty of paying for all insurance (health, auto, homeowners, etc.).

Recently he sold one of his cars, and he fixed up another one and garaged another one to be his project next summer. He asked me to please switch the insurance from the garaged one to the one he fixed up and drop it completely from the one he sold (confusing I know). Thank goodness we know our insurance agent really, really well- I have the girl's email address and she knows us on a first name basis now (yikes)

Anyway, so whatever leftover balances they had they applied to future payments on our other cars, but when all was said and done, there was somehow still some extra money floating around that they couldn't apply to anything. I got an envelope in the mail yesterday thinking it was just another policy renewal, and turns out it was a check for $25.20, labeled as a "Policy Dividend" by our agent.

WOOHOO!

So this morning I'm heading to the bank to deposit $26 from eBay, and $25 from the car insurance into my account which I can use to help pay for these medical bills that keep rolling in. Also, since my son just had a birthday, I have $115 to deposit in his savings- once it reaches $1000 we're going to transfer it to a money market account in the same bank. I do my banking at a credit union which has fantastic rates, awesome programs for kids, and makes everything super easy.

Yesterday before work I listed about $150 worth of textbooks on amazon and half.com. One of my books was only selling on average for $2 (it's a workbook) so I decided it wasn't worth it to pay the listing fees.



Edited to Update with Awesomeness:

Went to the bank and started up the baby's savings. Also, while I was stuck in there anyway, asked if they would change my direct deposit contribution so that instead of my entire check going to my checking account, $40 goes to the savings biweekly and the rest to checking. It was so incredibly easy that I feel stupid for not doing it 5 years ago when I started the account- I could've had $5200 in savings by now if I would've started sooner.

Anyway, I was thinking about my 457 plan and how about $100 a month goes into it and feeling kind of pathetic, until I did the calculations and realized that I am putting 5% of my net income into my retirement. That's really not that shabby at all considering I have 25 years to go. With this $40 biweekly going into my other savings, that's almost another 5%- so I'm pretty much putting 9%(ish) into long term and short term savings. Not bad at all for a 23 year old.

As of next Friday I have a $0.66/hr raise. I knew it was coming for a while now, but only really figured out the cold hard numbers yesterday. When I did this, I found that after taxes I'm only really going to see about a $35 difference in my biweekly paycheck (80 hours), but I'm not too disappointed by that.

I have a pension that is funded by me and my employer. I also have a 457 plan available to me, and currently I am contributing $35 biweekly to my 457 Retirement plan (I work for the government and do not have 401k, 403b, etc.). I've been contributing to this for a little over a year, and already have over $1300 in it (and remember, that's at $35 every other week).

Since I got this raise I figured I would go ahead and up my contribution to $50 biweekly. The funds that I've been investing in have had really a lot more success than I would expect in a long-term retirement type of thing. A lot of people who work with me don't start funding their 457 until about 10 years until retirement or so, they just always assume that their pension (and yes, I do have one pretty amazing pension) takes care of everything and that the 457 is icing on the cake. Factor in that I started mine at the age of 22- my retirement years are going to rock.