Our tax rebate

I forgot to mention that we got our tax rebate the other day! Wohoo! $1,800. Awww yeah. It’s nice to check your account and it’s almost $2,000 bigger than you were expecting.

We are putting the money into our vacation fund. It’s more than enough to take us all to Disneyland for a few days. We think we might need the money for bills, but we are going to try not to spend it. We will plan our trip when we know we are in the clear. Until then we are just going to do our best to hold onto it. If it ends up that we need it then we just won’t go to Disneyland this year. Not the worst thing in the world, I know.

It’s a psychological thing to have a separate savings account for our vacations. By putting it directly into the vacation fund it’s like saying “We are going.” It will be a loss if we have to take the money out of that account. We will be willing to make sacrifices to keep what we have.

Our short term savings account is where we take money from if we are short on bills. We fund this account each year from our tax returns. We think this fund might be a little short because overtime at my husband’s job was very limited at the start of the year and we had to use more of the fund than we intended to. If we were to put the rebate in this account then it’s like saying “We probably aren’t going on vacation this year. We need the money for bills.” Then there is no loss if we don’t go and no need to make sacrifices to make it happen.

It reminds me of this one year at my dad’s job. His company gave annual bonuses for meeting performance goals. One year they gave the bonuses at the beginning of the period and told everyone that if they don’t meet their goals they have to give the money back. As you can imagine the percentage of those who met the goals skyrocketed. Although, I doubt it was very good for morale. But I’m using the same principle to trick myself into saving for our vacation.

Pic by: Miro-Foto