I got a promotion... and a raise (a small one, but still).
DH got the other job, which pays a bit more and is closer (double-money savings).
I'm feeling so much better about life and money.
Yay for you:) Raises are the best especially when you don't see it comming!
How did everyone fare over the holidays? My dad picked up some items for us and gave us a generous offer to take our time paying it back (which should be accomplished in the next week or so) and we paid cash for the rest. Didn't pay off much debt but stayed current on bills didn't get deeper in debt either. Also one of our monthly payments has now been paid off so we can concentrate on other things. Looking forward to the new year and taxes coming back to get a little further ahead!
Not a banner month, that's for sure. We went just a little over budget on everything from gifts to electricity. Wound up having to call an emergency family meeting to reprioritize and rebudget. Everything worked out in the end, but ... well, we've done better! No new debt, at least.
Anka
We did ok. I ended up going to the emergency room on Christmas eve, so that's another bill we really don't need.
Man, we spent a lot this month. December started out with a move into our own one-bedroom apt, which is just slightly cheaper rent than we were paying to share a two-bedroom. It's been so awesome and freeing to finally have OUR OWN PLACE, I sometimes find myself just smiling and looking around thinking "this is ours." It's not huge, but it's the perfect size for our family of three, and we can finally just relax and not have to worry about annoying the roommate with our habits or dd's toys or grubby toddler hand prints or whatever.
Moving is always an expense, but I think we did a pretty good job of keeping it as low as possible. We did all our own moving, by ourselves. Unfortunately I VASTLY underestimated the time it'd take to pack/move, and we didn't have everything totally packed before renting the UHaul (big mistake, lesson learned) so we ended up renting it for 2 days instead of 1. We also rented the smallest UHaul available and then had to take multiple trips to get all of our stuff moved (I honestly had no idea just how much STUFF we own!) Total UHaul costs came out to $120, ugh.
The apt didn't come with a fridge, so we got one for $150 on craigslist. Huge ordeal, the fridge was a lot bigger than I'd assumed and actually fell over on top of the guy from whom we bought it when he was loading it into our UHaul. The truck was too small for the fridge (another reason we should have gone for the bigger UHaul), so we had to transport it lying down. I've heard that you're not supposed to move a fridge on its side, but that if you only do so for a short distance and then leave it upright for at least 24 hours before turning it on, it's usually ok. We bought the fridge really close to our new apt, so I figured it'd be fine. When we got to the new place it was late and dark, and a really strong wind storm was kicking up. Well long story short, we couldn't fit the 
fridge through the front door! So we ended up leaving it out on the stoop and coming back the next day, when a friendly new neighbor helped us take the door off the apartment AND the fridge, and it just barely squeezed in.
So after some initial problems with plugging it into an outlet that couldn't support the energy, we finally got it plugged in and working, thought I always kinda felt like it wasn't running quite cold enough. It worked that way for about a month and then finally just conked out. I paid a guy $50 to come over for about 3 minutes and tell me that it'd be about $400 to fix. 
Luckily Sears was having a year-end sale on large appliances, and we also got approved for 18 months interest-free financing. Still, we just increased our debt by more than $800. *Sob*
So right now we have:
$1,500 @ 6% on Bof A
$2,000 @ 0% on Citi
and $800 @ 0% on Sears.
We're planning to use (part of?) our tax return to pay off the BofA, and then we have over a year interest-free to pay off the rest. So we're going to take our time on that and turn our attention to building up savings instead. We've got $2,000 saved right now (plus $400 in an account for dd) and we're hoping to get that up to at least $6,000 by the end of 2012. I'd be happier with closer to $10,000 (6 months FF EF) but I'm trying to be realistic.
Man, that was a long post.
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