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Archive for March, 2008

Giving YNAB Another Try

March 8th, 2008 at 01:30 am


I found my access key to download
Text is YNAB and Link is "www.youneedabudget.com
YNAB to my laptop. I thought I'd give this another try. I like the concept of it, but just never stuck with it long enough to make it work.

I have my budget entered and now I guess I need to go back and enter in my transactions for at least the month of February. It probably would be wise to spend the extra time and do the entire year so far so that I have a more accurate view of our finances.

I have to wait up for DS#3 to get back from a date anyway. Might as well make the time productive!

Bad Day

March 7th, 2008 at 12:21 am


Today was not my day. It started out by me forgetting to take my lunch to work so I had to end up buying a slice of pizza while I was on the road doing a delivery.

Got to the library. Got out of the car and slipped on the ice and fell flat on my left side. Both hands were full so I couldn't even break my fall. Get into the library, and since it's Thursday and the library director works, our lights were not on. (She can't be bothered to flip on the 2 switches at the end of the row that she turns on). Marched up front and turned the lights on and told her I'd fallen. She laughed. That really made me happy. It is her responsibility to call the borough and get them out to sand. She didn't bother.

On my delivery I came around a bend and was face to face with a semi. A state truck was pulled off the road on the opposite side with it's 4-ways on so the semi had come into my lane to go around it. Thank goodness the System Jeep has good brakes!

Get to my delivery place, unload all the books and audio books onto my cart. Start up the ramp into the library and get halfway up and slip on ice. Managed to catch myself so that I and the cart didn't go sliding to the bottom.

Yes, it was an exciting day. Not one I'd care to repeat again. I hope I'm able to get out of bed tomorrow. I'm already feeling the effects of the fall.

I did have to sort of chuckle at my one delivery stop. I was checking in the books and realized that the radio station that was on was playing
Text is Bad Day and Link is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIcFgl6zf3A
Bad Day by Daniel Powter. Couldn't have been more appropriate.

Priorities

March 5th, 2008 at 12:28 am


As I was working in Quicken tonight with DH's profit share check I was listening to my songs I've bought on ITunes and Casting Crowns song, "American Dream", came on. I had to put aside what I was doing for a while and listen to it.

What we discuss here about personal finance is all very important, but there are more important things in life. How many of us are so busy trying to get out of debt that we tend to neglect our families? Just something to think about.

Take a look at the video on YouTube:

Text is American Dream and Link is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPqZSbs8IMo
American Dream. I think it will give you something to think about.

Profit Share Check

March 4th, 2008 at 08:30 pm


Today DH received his spring profit share check. I am sending half of it to our gift savings account to cover gifts for the year and the rest is going in the house repair fund toward the new roof.

I would much rather apply the entire thing to the mortgage, but I know that we would then be in trouble later on and be tempted to borrow. So for now, it will sit in our ING account and earn some interest.

E-mealz Review

March 2nd, 2008 at 11:44 pm


I had mentioned
Text is e-mealz and Link is "www.e-mealz.com
e-mealz in a previous post. It is a site that, for $5 a month, provides you with menus and a grocery list for your dinners for a week. You pay for 3 months at a time and a new meal plan is posted once a week. My plan is available on Friday so when I log in I print out 2 copies of the menu and grocery list. One I place in a sheet protector in a 3-ring binder for future use and the other is the one I write on and mark up.

They have several plans to choose from. I chose the Point system meals for any grocery store, since I am counting Weight Watchers points to lose weight.

This will be our 3rd week using the plan and it appears that our average expense is $120 per week. That's about what we were spending before for a family of 5 and not having nearly as nice of meals as we are now.

Everyone in the family is really enjoying the meals. There is a lot of variety and the side dishes are wonderful. Our side dishes before amounted to opening a can of corn or beans. Now we have mandarin orange salad, honey-kissed slaw, oven roasted veggies, etc. Much tastier and healthier.

I think the thing that makes it most worth it to me is that I no longer have the dilemma of "what is for dinner?" and then wondering if I have all of the ingredients. It is a huge load off of my mind. That alone makes it worth it for me.

I like having a list of exactly what I need for each meal when I enter the grocery store. I am not a shopper so, for me, the grocery store is a mission. Get what we need and get out in as short a time as possible.

My grocery bill could be considerably less if we didn't drink as much milk as we do!!!

Think I Finally Figured It Out

March 1st, 2008 at 05:09 pm


I think I finally figured out DH's retirement website. What a pain that thing is! I see when I logged on that they are in the process of developing a new site. Thank goodness!!!

I have been wanting to reallocate his investments for ages, but each time I finally managed to log onto the site, I was so confused that I had no idea what to do. And I would get so frustrated that I'd just about be in tears, so I'd just give up. Today I finally took the time to sift through everything and saw the link I needed to do the changes.

He has had this plan since 1991 and the money seems to do absolutely nothing with the only allocations that were available to us until recently. Just this year they finally added some more options and I knew that I wanted to get his investments out of where they were and into a targeted fund account.

So now everything (I think) is in the targeted fund account. We'll see how that does. I sure hope it does better than what it has been doing all these years!