Earlier this afternoon, David Cameron cheered everyone up by saying that Britain had halved its £1.7 billion bill to the EU.
And George Osborne released his own statement saying that the government would pay "£850m total".
He also said this, just to make things absolutely clear.
People were pretty impressed. The bill came at a particularly bad time for the government and for a while it looked like there was no way out.
But then Bloomberg published an article saying the UK had "failed" to cut the EU bill.
Attempting to clarify the situation, the Irish finance minister, Michael Noonan, told reporters in Brussels: "The UK will pay the whole amount without any penalties attached or interest rates. The instalments will be paid over a period of time."
So what exactly changed – and what did David Cameron and George Osborne mean by their statements?
Firstly, the government will not have to pay the bill by 1 December 2014, as was initially threatened, but by September 2015, which can be seen as a victory of sorts.
Secondly, the bill will be interest-free.
Thirdly, although everyone initially thought that the total bill had been halved to £850 million, that's since been determined to be false. Instead, it would be fair to say that the government will have to directly pay £850 million.
So what about the the other £850 million? The EU will still get that money from Britain but it won't come from the government directly; the EU will take the money from a rebate that Britain expected to receive.
Breaking that down, typically "the UK receives a rebate on their contribution" to the EU, according to the EU budget commissioner, because it has paid too much. According to The Guardian, Britain's rebate was expected to knock £850 million off the demand for £1.7 billion. This money will now be returned to the EU in September.
And the pro-EU reform think-tank Open Europe has written in a blog post: "Osborne [is] right on the amount but may be exaggerating the extent of the concession."
A spokesperson for the Treasury told BuzzFeed News that the broad difference is that the European Commission is going to separately apply the formula normally used to calculate the UK's annual rebate to this specific one-off payment.