I just posted about finding some gift cards that had been forgotten, well, I forgot that my son just got a $25 gift card for his birthday for The Children's Place. Nice!

I also received a check from CafePress yesterday, which added another $25.71 to the total of found money! I average one check a year of about $30 from Cafepress for products I made eight years ago. I keep saying I should do more on them since they are making some money and I do absolutely nothing with them, but I just haven't found the time. It's pretty cool that it makes enough to pay for it's monthly store fee and pay out something to me each year. I can definitely see the perks to having a passive income, maybe someday...

So, lots of fun "found" money recently, but I also just got an email notice that my utility bill is coming and it's BIG. I don't think they have credited my last month's payment, so that will bring it down some, but it'll still be bigger than normal. We moved during this last cycle, so we have two weeks that we are responsible for the utilities are our new place as well as at our rental. I think once everything is hashed out, it will be about $100 more than normal; I will be glad when all of these moving expenses are behind us!

I just cleaned out my purse and had no idea I had so much money hiding in there! I had three gift cards I had forgotten about, one I was just given and tons of change. I can't believe I had forgotten about that Gap gift card!

Target gift card - $10
Gap gift card - $25
Joann's Fabric gift card - 51 cents
Starbucks gift card - $5
loose change - $9.85

I added the loose change to a glass jar we started to save money for finishing our basement. The rest will probably be saved to offset Christmas shopping.

I decided to check the few other gift cards I knew I still had and found...

Toys R Us - $10
Office Max - $10
Ruth's Chris Steakhouse - $100

I kind of hoard gift cards until they can be used when I'll really appreciate it instead of just speading it willy-nilly. Yeah! I love finding money.

It's been almost four months since I last wrote and it's been a busy, crazy time. We bought a house since we are staying here long term and to rent an apartment or townhouse would have cost us MORE per month than buying. Rent would have been $300-500 more than our mortgage & escrow combined! We were blessed to find a single family with three bedrooms and a yard (we were in a 2 bedroom condo with three kids). It is older and we have had to see the potential, but it's wonderful and I feel very blessed.

We had to take a little of our retirment for the down payment, but we plan on this being our forever house and will have it paid off right at retirement (if we don't put any extra towards it), so that helps me feel better about it. We could not have afforded to rent a three bedroom so it just made financial sense since we really needed three bedrooms.

Anyway, perhaps even better was getting our credit counseling statement in the mail today. We started in June 2010, just as my husband was laid off, with $34,643 in debts. Ugh. August 2012 statement shows we have paid $18,098 and have an estimated balance of $19,112.90! We are about halfway there! I have had to readjust our balances once a year since we pay it down faster than their estimations, so I expect that we will pay our last payment around Sept/Oct 2014, a full year early. It just makes me happy; I cannot wait to have that money back in our budget each month to bolster our retirement savings and just to have wiggle room.