How We Spent Our Holiday Bonus this Year

This year we’ve had a couple of windfalls come our way. Windfalls are described as unexpected monetary gifts. It’s like winning the lottery or getting an inheritance. I love it when a windfall comes because in my head I’m immediately calculating the many ways we can put that money to use to help propel us further into our debt payoff plan.  This month a windfall came our way in the form of an end of the year bonus. Mr. Broke on Purpose has been getting an end of the year bonus for the last couple of years, but I never like to get comfortable and expect that the money is going to automatically show up. His company could decide to change the bonus this year into something that we technically can’t spend right away, so I never like to count my chickens before they’re hatched.

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This year when the bonus came I would be lying if I said I didn’t think about just having fun with the money and just saying forget the debt. We could use a new rug in our bedroom, new bedding, and I’d love to get new curtains for the living room to keep our dogs from hanging out in our windows. This type of thinking is dangerous because I could see myself going HomeGoods crazy if given permission. Thankfully I had my husband by my side to reel me back in from my wishful thinking before I spent all the money on things I’d like to have but didn’t necessarily need.

Instead of me using my imagination we made a list of things that we really needed for the household. One being a new cable modem so we’d stop getting all those notices from Comcast that our modem wasn’t strong enough to handle our current plan. We also needed to purchase a food saver since Ziploc unfortunately, discontinued our favorite bags that we could pump the air out of.

The next thing we did was pay ourselves by adding an additional $200 per person to the allotted “mad money” for the month. We also took our money for Tithes, because to us all windfalls are blessings and so we make sure to give back a portion of what was given to us.

We bought a few Christmas gifts (sticking to a predefined budget) and then decided to put the rest of the money towards paying off our current student loan.

Maybe sometime very soon in the future we’ll get to really enjoy windfalls that come our way, but for right now we have to do the “responsible adult thing” and make sure that we have an agreed upon plan for how to spend it and that we’re spending it in a way that will benefit us both.