Tithing Blessings

What keeps surprising me is tithing blessings.

Years ago we were broke newlywed college students and meticulous with our money. Beyond meticulous, less than 45 cents were spent without me knowing about it. We knew exactly how much housing, food, books, tuition, etc etc would all cost, and we would know how much we made over the summers and how much Brent would make each month during school (he was only allowed to work 20 hours) and we always knew we were going to have to take out a loan before summer, but yet some how there was always enough money for us to move and get to our first summer paycheck. Literally the exact amount we needed.
Brent graduated in 7 semesters and got a full time job, after that things were never as stark.

But this past year has surprised me.
We decided last spring to do a garage sale, this was sort of a big deal for us, because we had never before followed through on our plans to actually have a garage sale. Multiple times in our marriage we would plan on selling a bunch of stuff, but then run out of time during a move and just donate it.
I guess since we weren't short on time for moving and we had A LOT of big ticket items it was actually worth it to sale. I pulled out $100 in small bills before the sale, and then we made a couple hundred more. We made decent, but at the same time we still question was it worth it? We didn't make as much as I was planning on.

Come Fall, Brent's company broke off and merged with another one. The new company gave us stock options, we had stock options from a previous employer so Brent jumped on that. We made quite a bit of money a few years ago. He maxed out that benefit without really running the numbers so it was a bit of a shock for us to say the least. We had more than $1,000 less each month, sure we would get it back in 6 months two fold, but what where we going to do in the mean time?

A couple things happened:
The stock purchase came after I bought school clothes and school supplies so that money was already spent so Brent told me just don't worry about it.

There is a lot of back to school expenses that happen other than supplies and clothes. School pictures, class fees, field trips, class parties, halloween costumes, cross country fees, etc etc. I ended up using the cash that we made at the garage sale to pay for most of this stuff. After a few months of constantly dipping into this envelope. I thought huh! I'm an answer to my own tithing blessing.

I love how the Lord provided for us, even if I didn't realize what he was doing. We changed our budget and our expenses and now we don't even realize we are living on $600 less a paycheck. But it was a blessing none the less.
I guess its true, "you can always save more".
But you can't always do more activities that cost money and save more.