To Spend Or Not To Spend

As I mentioned in our post before we gave ourselves wiggle room and can spend in one more location than we have slated. However, a couple tensions came up already.

We are planning a vacation to Toronto with some good friends of ours from Indiana. We are splitting some of the costs and responsibilities of planning, and Alyssa and I were given the task of finding a place to stay. We are down to two potential locations, but then I realized that we have to spend money to reserve the space. I know we made this decision before this month, so in some ways I think it could be an exception. But we would still be spending money. When it came down to it, we decided that this was something already in the works and was not a "choice" to spend money in January, but the consequence of a previous decision and following through with a responsibility . . . 

Also, I was planning on attending the Interfaith Initiative of Santa Barbara's "Religion & the Environment" dinner. The dinner is a time for leaders and lay folks from various local faith communities to come together, form relationships, and discuss mutual areas of concern for the Santa Barbara community. It costs $25 and like the Toronto vacation, this is something I had decided on attending a while ago, but I never registered. I decided not to attend because, technically, we'd still be spending money. . .

On Thursday, Alyssa went stand up paddle boarding with a friend. I was at our apartment doing some work and I got a call. Alyssa asked if it would be breaking the rules to pay for extra-time since the excursion was paid for a couple months ago. After talking we decided that "yes" it would still be spending money to pay for an extension so we didn't . . .