01-17-2025 -- Expensive Month each year

Howdy all. January is always an expensive month for me. It is the month for real estate (property) tax 1/2 year payment, and for house ($1200) and truck insurance ($1400) for the year, and it always seems to collect other “one-time” financial hits. This year was also truck registration for next 5 years. That was just under $400 for the longer period. Ouch. Still better than paying each year with the filing fees. Shoot, even had to fill the truck’s gasoline tank today. That was close to $90 ($2.99.9 per gallon and needed almost 30 of the 36 gallons possible.) Good part about that is, I may not fill it again until close to the end of the year. I get about 19 mpg doing the short trips I take each week, and barely put a thousand miles on the truck each year. It is a 2018, and has 29,093 miles on it. When I purchased it, it already had like 13,000. So in six years, I added 16 thousand miles. Mostly that was in the first year, while making 3 trips from Florida to Ohio and back, driving around in multiple states searching for where I was going to move.

This year, the county re-evaluated properties. They do it like once every 6 years. Every year the house’s valuation goes up, and thus, so do taxes, but the 6th year they go all out and get caught up with any discrepancies. You likely know that house prices have jumped a bunch in the last few years. Well, this house is up about 60 % in the five years I’ve lived in it. Sounds nice, right?

It is until the tax man cometh. Taxes have slowly creeped up for those first 4 years, but this year it is an 18% jump. Ouch!! From what I’m hearing, I got lucky. Some people are saying hits of as much as 50%. I was really expecting mine to be higher too. The county/schools/state should be rolling in dollar bills by the end of the year. Why don’t I think that there will be fewer potholes, or that teachers will be paid more, or that kids will get a better education? But I do believe that the public officials will be driving better cars to their summer homes to get on their new boats.

Add to the taxes, insurance always goes up around 10% each year. That’s to give you incentive to leave one company for another.

My Medicare is up, my prescription drug insurance is up, dental is up (all much more than the Social Security percentage increase).

And to top it off, I just paid a humongous amount to an oral surgeon for an extraction, bone graft and an implant. The bill was over $3000, with the insurance company not really paying a fair share. So the last month was painful more than just financially. I will also get dinged a bunch of $$$ for a crown on the implant, in a few months!!

Now the good news. It is 32 degrees outside. Yep, all the way up to freezing. And it will go up a couple more degrees today and again tomorrow. Actually hit 40 today (Friday). Until Monday through Wednesday when temperatures will fall to below 0 freedom degrees. And winds pick up to help to get wind chill temps in the MINUS 20 range. Brrrr.

Makes it tough to Enjoy Life.