I just finished up our taxes last night. I started doing them at the beginning of February, but we kept getting more 1099s that I had forgotten about and my tuition forms hadn't been posted. This weekend I checked and they were finally up. Thank goodness I waited, our refund nearly doubled due to the amount of tuition we've paid this year.

I'm a little surprized at how much we'll be getting. Part of me is temped to spend it, especially since I have a spring break trip to Key West coming up. But before I do anything too rash, I'm going to earmark it for our 2009 roth contributions. This will hopefully make me think twice before raiding it. It's also crazy to think that we'll be having such a huge jump on our 2009 contributions!

Anyway, the program I used (Tax Cut Free File) states our marginal tax bracket as 15% and our effective tax bracket as 1%. Craziness! The socialist in me is a little disheartened. Oh well, I'm sure we have years and years of good tax paying years ahead of us!

So I haven't written in almost a month, mostly because nothing has really been happening on the financial front. We maxed out our 2008 Roth contributions the end of last month, so that was exciting. Unfortunately it left us $300 shy of the highest tier of interest in our savings account. It should be corrected this month though, but I can't stand losing even a little interest!

Our spending/saving has been pretty status quo the last couple of months since DH moved. We aren’t saving as much as we had been because we now have second rent and utility payments, but we aren’t really spending more than we make either.
It seems like the last 2-3 months DH and I have spent around $300 in travel expenses. Not great for our budget, but necessary when you live 1300 miles away from one another. So I was thinking that February would be free from travel expenses. But then DH’s “deployment” to Italy was pushed back a month to the 21st of February. So I was going to fly up there to see him during the 3 day weekend. Well despite being a federal holiday, he was going to have to work a significant portion of the weekend, so it really wouldn’t have worked out. I was pretty bummed that I wasn’t going to be able to see him before he left for ~3 months.

But then the Navy provided! He was able to get on a flight down to Jax on Valentine’s Day! He was only in town 16 hours but it was good to see him!! And, not only did we not have to pay for flights, DH will actually get paid some for coming down here. Last month when he was here for the weekend we got an extra $220. Since it was only 1 night it will probably only be like an extra $50, but hey, it paid for dinner! I love that the Navy will pay DH to come home to visit me.

Now that DH is leaving the country, I’m curious how that will change things financially. We will still have to pay for his rent, but he’s turning off the other utilities, so we shouldn’t have to pay them. Also he will be getting per diem, which is extra pay you get when not at home to pay for living expenses like hotels and food (this is what DH gets when he visits me). Per diem can be significant, but I don’t know how much it is or when/how we will get paid for it. It may be that we don’t see any of it until he comes back home in May.