She had arranged for friends of ours to watch our son and we would then go have dinner, see a movie and maybe a cup of joe. Sounds nice, right? We hop in the minivan(romantic) and start our trek to our friends who by the way live 20 minutes away, the equivalet of 12 miles. Keep in mind our van gets 20 mpg. So right off the bat we would burn through some of our budgeted gas money that is supposed to last between pay cycles.

Then, not more than 2 miles away from home reality sinks in as I explain that we had $18.36 in our account to make it to payday. Not enough money for any of our “planned” date activites. $18 and change will get dinner for two via fast food, enough for one of us to see a movie(I think), or how about say…oh I don’t know…milk, eggs, butter, the staple foods that you run out of at home.

This began the even going sour, we pulled over into the Walgreens parking lot to discuss what we were going to do. My wife got upset knowing that her romantic idea of quiet night out just went out the window. We went back and forth, until I finally said, No. We were not going to do this. The whole idea was to live like no one else, and keep on our plasectomy. We then, right there decided to have a cheap date. At Christmas we were given a $20 gift certificate to a local Greek restaurant that we enjoy. We drove the two minutes back home, ran inside for the gift certificate and went to the restaurant. The bill including tip came out just over $20. Things got a little hairy towards the end with our 16 month old, but it was relaxed and so much more enjoyable than the other idea ever would have been with the stress of that proverbial elephant called debt in the backseat.

The evening ended well with a night of card games and didn’t ruin our plasectomy.