fat and taxes

Not a lot to write tonight (or so I think).

I have just done our taxes for 2007 and 2008 and am quite pleased. As soon as I send the suckers (just need to grab mom’s credit card info tomorrow morning), not only will we be 100% up to date with our tax junk until next year, we’ll be getting back close to $4000 for those years combined!!! WOOOOOT!!!! Par-tay time! I want to wake up BF and tell him the good news!!!! Stupid insomnia… I’ve been sleeping literally backward hours… from about 8am to 3pm… at least on this medication I’m getting longer and better sleep but soon hopefully I can get my timing straight too…. ANYWAY

We are also due a refund of around $1500 from the stupid GST people who didn’t file BF’s business taxes properly and started guaranshee-ing his wages in October. That was a PITA at the time but easy saved money now!!

Right to the savings account with all of it when it gets here, man!! YAY!! This has me feeling quite prepared for life now. Wasn’t expecting such large refunds from the two income taxes… You never know if they will find errors or whatever so I won’t count my chickens until the cheques arrive but phewf! what a relief! I used an approved program online though so hopefully everything will work. I used it the last time I filed… I will have to pull out those records and check their accuracy compared to the actual refund amounts… 

JUST THESE AMOUNTS will put us at around $5500 automatically in savings. WOAH. That’s going to go a good long way towards our wedding, especially when combined with my mom’s $5000 gift and the $1000 my aunt has promised. I wasn’t at all sure how we would ever afford this wedding trip… Now it actually looks possible. Even as possible as this June like we had originally wanted….

The one thing holding me back from that is my weight. I do NOT want to be a fat, poofy marsamallow bride. I wonder how much I could lose if we post-poned until the fall….. I really fell off the wagon after the doctor told me I could expect a maximum loss of 2 lbs per month in my condition, with all my stupid problems. I tell myself this is stupid that I should care SO much about being slender for my wedding day – it’s only one day afterall, right? – but it just DOES matter to me. These are pictures we’re going to have our entire life, show everyone we know. And they’re going to be different since they’ll be in Africa so you want them to be flawless… Also, I want to be better conditioned physically for the trip. With my weight as it is now (I haven’t even gone on the scale so I can’t update you but I can tell my body is heavier but the shape of my lard…) I would be sweating excessively, not able to walk to explore things, I won’t have stamina, I’ll be tired a lot… I won’t be able to find a NICE wedding dress in a short period of time (I -hate- shopping for clothes and this promises to be hell because it’s such an important dress).  I’d really like to be able to look freaking HOTTTTT in my breathtaking safari wedding pics and somehow have my ex see them. hehehe I don’t see how that will ever happen save me sending them directly to him LOL but it’s a nice fantasy nonetheless. Anything to motivate me right??

Anyhoo, this amount of $5500 doesn’t even include the $2000 we worked into our bank loan to put towards the wedding. Now, *so ashamed* I have to admit that we spent about $1200 of that money on god knows what and the last $800 might go towards rent at the end of this month depending how much my support cheque is… but I’m determined to get that money back asap. It would only take 6 months to get the $1200 back if we saved $200 a month… We pretty much had been doing double that bi-weekly over the past 3 months anyway thanks to the guaranshee… so technically if we did that… bi-weekly $200 starting in April because there’s just too many things in March with birthdays and the damn car renewal shit… we could have $2000 saved by August, in 5 months. woah. 

And this spring we are also having a family yard sale to act as our stag and doe… everybody donates things and we sell EVERYTHING to raise money for our trip. BF and I aren’t really party/drinking/dancing people and everyone has too much crap (and my family in particular enjoys yard sales) so this seems like a perfect fit. When we did our last yard sale here we raised about $300 and every little bit helps… We could do this one over two days, a weekend, too… or rent a hall maybe… hmmm…. HMMMM……………….

The yard sale S&D would be in Ottawa. My mom already has half her living room full of stuff we were going to sell in October. We cancelled due to my aunt’s health and the cousin’s wedding drama… and the cold. We also have boxes and boxes and BOXES of miscellaneous crap here in this apartment that I have been meaning to get my ass in gear to sell on line… kijiji and all that shit. maybe even ebay. If I sold everything for a buck each I would have at LEAST $1500 I would say. At LEAST.

Anyway, so I feel like we’re suddenly and finally going to have a good start on a better playing field… It’s a nice feeling to have that sort of money stored away with the economy the way it is, even without thoughts of wedding. It was really starting to worry me… but BF’s job seems secure enough at the moment… and now we have a nestegg (is that the right word?) to carry us through in the event of a disaster…

Not sure what this means for moving… I’m starting to feel like I’m going to be stuck down here forever… the job market isn’t exactly the best right now anywhere and the higher rent rates (for smaller spaces) closer to Ottawa won’t exactly make things easy on us… It’s also daunting to use $10K on a wedding trip when we could use it as a down payment on a house… Not sure if we could afford a house on a monthly basis yet though… hmm… I’m too damn practical for my own good sometimes.

Well, at least now we will have more options, right?!?