Rollercoaster weekend

I got little sleep after work on Saturday, and woke up very early on Sunday. My brother and wifey came by. We chatted a bit. While talking about them and their family, out of the blue, I realized something...

My parents are traveling back to our home country for 15 days starting today for some reason I'm not afforded to know. While they're out, they wanted me to pay for some things. Which I agreed to as long as they deposited the money first. Then they didn't have the money to buy their tickets ($560) until Friday, so I offered to pay the tickets and get refunded on Fri plus any extra bills they wanted paid. Friday came and went, I asked for the payments and they finally made it the following Tuesday. But I only got $600. In between all that happening, I already had to pay for the car insurance which they refund me for as agreed. I pay for the car insurance from my bank account because we needed to set billpay for a discount, and we linked it to mine since we couldn't link it to theirs.

After paying the $40, I told them all that was still missing, including the car insurance. About $700 worth of bills. I know it wasn't happening. So I just left it to them pay for the stuff themselves and stopped following up. Except for the car insurance I did pay. I forgot all about it until Sunday morning. I went back and read my notes and saw the cash movement. Yup. I had let that one slip. I asked my dad if they were planning to pay the rest of the stuff. I asked 7 times. He doesn't know. They will. They'll try. No conclusive answer. So now I know for sure I won't get that. I will consider it their gift for going home. Hopefully they have some fun. But I'm pretty ticked off at myself for not catching that.

I’m $280 behind because of this little mishap. I’ll count this separately from my budget, as this was a limitation I had mentioned for the challenge.

Now, here’s a healthy dosage of good things:
-I bought a shirt for $6.36. It’s nice, plain and boring. But it’s long sleeved and good for layering. I also tried some other clothes, but none of them fit me right. At least I tried.
-I also bought a wireless computer mouse. I’ve wanted one for the past 3-4 months, and finally found a good one for $7.49 on reduced sale.
-I cleaned the closet, thanks to Carla, and got rid of some clothes.
-I haven’t really spent anything in groceries. I might not have to either until this weekend. Success!
-I’m working Friday at my other job at their request, even though I was originally off. I could use the extra money to offset those $280.
-Thanks to my driving habits (ha…, no honestly. I was the only one that qualified for a discount) we qualified for lower insurance premiums. The rate is not finalized or anything yet, but it is scheduled to go down to $222/mo instead of $280/mo.

I am fighting a bit of an internal battle about what to do about the rate change. I could tell my dad the price remained at $280 and just pocket the ~$60 overage. Not for me of course… for their secret EF fund. Their secret EF fund is locked in at $250 (which was what my portion when we sold my car for pieces when it died). I keep forgetting that money exists. OR I could just tell them the rates went down and have them pay $222. What should I do?

There is no way in this side of heaven that they would manage the extra money. As in, they wouldn’t consider it as someone who’s conscious about their money would. They don’t know how the money moves in that house as is, so this ‘extra’ money would just get sucked into the black hole.