What are YOU doing with your stimulus check?

I still haven't decided. And since I haven't gotten mine yet, I am not committing the money to anything until its been cashed. But its still a good question. What are you going to do with a free $600 - $1200+ check?

From what I have read, the checks are not to be taxed income and will not effect next year's tax returns (if anyone can cite something that says otherwise, please let me know). That being said, assuming the money is free as in beer and freedom ... then I still don't know what I am going to do with it. From what I understand Em and I will be getting $1200 (married filing jointly) but we shall see.

My initial thought was to use it to buy some of the stuff we were going to buy anyway for the house ... but in the end that just means I stuck it into our saving account which doesn't seem very fun ;-)

Today when I had a few free minutes I came up with the following list, aprox. in increasing order of "fun" (which happens to be the inverse of the "responsible" things to do):

• Add to emergency fund
  
• Mortgage - hurray for saving interest and money for whenever we sell the house
• Em's last school loan
• Car loan - thats 4 months of of payments!
• Retirement - I took a small hit switching companies before all my money was vested, the new pay was worth it but most of that is going toward house improvements at the moment
• Upgrading some of the purchases we are going to make for the house irregardless (e.g. buying really nice washer/dryer or refrigerator instead of just nice)
• Extra misc house stuff we would like but aren't planning on buying
• Vacation fund - Em and I want to go on a big trip next year .... maybe
• LCD TV for downstairs (e.g. something like THIS)
  

Yep, the TV is sounding nice.

However, after making that list, I turned the piece of paper over and wrote down everything we want/need to buy in the next couple months related to moving into the house. Some of that list included.

• Bedroom furniture
• Living room furniture
• Yard stuff (rakes, shovels, mower, hoses, trimmer, patio furniture, etc)
• New exterior door
• Mattress, linens and towels for guest bedroom
• kitchen island thingy
• bookshelves for the office
• refrigerator
  
• washer/dryer
• window treatments
• paint
• cleaning supplies
• Ethernet cable and wall adapters (I want to run it throughout the house)

So, since that list is bigger and much more immediate I think we are just going to sock it away to use on some of those thing and the tons more that come with home ownership, moving and suddenly living in a space 3x bigger than you were a week ago.

So ... what are YOU doing with your rebate?