Paris in the fall!

Well, our medical bills are FINALLY paid.  What an ordeal, I tell yeah!  So all of this back and forth and waiting has been ridiculous.  On the last update we were waiting for one more bill to be reviewed by our insurance.  After Peter was calling them EVERY week to get an update and they reassured him it was in process, he talked to someone who told him that it was never sent back for review.  No, I am not even joking! So they finally sent that one back and it finally cleared and THEN we talked to the hospital and they said they just had a policy change and because it had been more than 60 days they would no longer offer us the discount for paying our bill in full.  I am glad Peter was handling all of this, because I may have gone ballistic on them.  Again, none of this was our fault - it was mistakes made by the insurance company and mistakes made by the hospital in their billing as to why we have not paid.  Fortunately, Peter had talked to one very nice lady at the end of July who had documented that they had offered us the refund so after he talked with a supervisor they decided that as long as we paid the bill in September we would still get the 15% discount.  Whew.

After all this, the one bill has been sent back to insurance for review AGAIN.  The insurance had some questions on it and so the hospital sent them the information they wanted, so it could get reduced even more but we needed to get the discount and have been assured that any additional amount covered would be mailed to us in a check.  So we decided to just end this 5 month battle and will be pleasantly surprised if we get a check in the mail in the coming weeks.  Ridiculous, I have to say!

So, with that being said.  Somehow, even after vacation and doing some car maintenance  and making sure that our savings account is still fully funded - we had some funds left over.  Enough to start our savings fund for a very fun trip we have started planning.

Peter and I have a list of lifetime accomplishments or a "bucket list".  Shockingly we've already accomplished or are on our way to accomplishing quite a few of them.  Maybe we need to have another heart to heart and find some more hearts desires.  Anyone who knows us (or reads this blog) knows that we LOVE Disneyland.  We have set a lifetime goal of visiting every Disney park worldwide!  We've hit all of the ones domestically, so in our conversations over our 5th anniversary last year, we decided we needed to start discussing a timeline for visiting a few of the International parks!  At the very top of my list is Disneyland Paris!  And with that, we decided last year that we would make a goal to visit Disneyland Paris for our 10th wedding anniversary.

Now, being the budget minded people that we are, we knew we would have to start planning years in advance if we want this to happen.  I was able to sit down and work up a very rough estimate of what this trip will cost.  It was so exciting for me to even think of making this dream come true, as Paris is definitely on the top of my places to visit list! It was completely shocking to me to find that there was any left over money that the medical bills didn't take from us, but whoohoo - the Paris fund has been started :) :) :)

We have also become "non-planners" for life events, which is a whole different story. I mean that to say that I used to try and plan every little detail of our life, but through these last couple years God has shown me that He has plans that are far greater than mine.  So, His plans always prevail!  I have no idea what our life is going to look like in one year, much less 4 years.  So, we are tentatively planning this trip and budgeting for it, while keeping an open mind that it may not work out EXACTLY the way we wanted.  But we are shooting for Fall of 2016!  4 years and counting ;)  Yes, we are a bit insane, but we will need every bit of those 4 years to save up for this one!!!