Glammah's Personal Finance Blog

So, we're relatively buried in snow here....

Nothing major, just a snowstorm - but all of our neighbors, including my father in law who owns this two-family that we live in (we rent out the top two floors)

He decided to shovel out the front of course so the mail carrier could get to our mailboxes, and the side of the house so he could put out his trash, and of course his driveway, but NOT ONE SPEC OF SNOW DID HE REMOVE FROM OUR DRIVEWAY.

Granted, ok...he is the landlord and he is SUPPOSED to do this, I can understand that we should pitch in, which we have in the past, many times.....

But, for reasons I won't go into here, I'm quite PO'd at him for something he did/said earlier in the week - but this is the same father-in-law and mother-in-law who purchased laptops that THEY HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO USE, and I've spent countless hours downstairs with them teaching them things, buying their plane tickets, ordering things for them online but when it comes to doing us a small favor or two, forget it?

Well, I give up... I'm not doing them another favor!

Anyway, my crazy tirade aside, we had some unintentional saving yesterday and possibly today because on Friday afternoon after we picked the kids up from school we left the debit card in the console of the jeep and are too lazy to shovel off the stairs and driveway to go get it.

We talked about going out to eat, going to pick up some things at the store, etc... instead we stayed warm and made dinner at home!!

Seriously, it's going to be 55 degrees on Thursday and 63 degrees on Friday, so it's all going to melt and the 4 wheel drive will get us out of the driveway in the meantime.

I'm just fed up with giving, giving, giving and getting nothing in return!

So, unintentional saving due to laziness... hey, it works, right? lol

I am going to try to post to this category on a monthly basis, so today being March 15th I'll hope to post on the 15th of every month about "Found Money"

Essentially that is money that comes out of the dryer, collects at the bottom of my purse, gets wrapped in receipts in compartments of my purse, etc...

I just cleaned out my purse and my desk at work and found exactly $6.05.

This is also going to include money that comes in from recycling soda bottles.

I'm bringing the money home and putting it away for now, each time it reaches $20 I'll deposit into the Savings account!

If I'm going to do this I may as well do it right, and post about the debt I have... I'm coming clean with everything...have to be honest to myself, right?

In addition to saving, I want to pay this down; it's not a huge number so it shouldn't be too difficult. And I know I shouldn't have so many cards w/ low balances all maxed out, but things happen - I've learned the error of my ways. They're all in good standing, I just need to get them down to 0!

Tonight I'll post about what my husband owes, which is less than what I owe, but I don't know the numbers off-hand.

So... for me:

Card one - balance due 712
Card two - balance due 205
Card three - balance due 458
Card four - balance due 0
Card five - balance due 291

Card 4, I just paid off - the limit is only $200.

I also last month made a large payment $500 to an account that was in collection. I started out owing about $2000 2 years ago - As of Feb. I owed a bit over $800, so I paid $500 which brought me to a balance of $387.

I just called and asked if they'd accept a settlement on the remainder and got it knocked down to $291 if I pay by March 30th, which is TOTALLY do-able since it's a 3 paycheck month!

Woohooo!

So, slowly, but surely the debt is getting paid.

I'll post later, as I said, about hubby's cards... he only has 3, or is it 4?

So, I have three children that are in elementary school.

Each day they take a snack to school for mid-morning break and usually they want milk with it which costs .35 per child per day.

That's $5.25 a week; $21 a month.

We just started going to Costco regularly and purchasing juice boxes (actually Kool Aid Jammers)

4 boxes of 12 drinks = 48 drinks for approx. $7

That's about 15 cents per drink, they last two weeks as long as no one drinks them at home instead of at school.

So, we're saving a bit on that and my quasi-lactose intolerant son isn't getting a tummyache at the end of the day by drinking all that milk.

Definitley a win-win.

So, I've had an ING Direct account for several years now, I'd put in a few dollars, take out a few dollars...

Nothing huge.

Last weekend we made a commitment to regularly add to the account to ensure that we have enough money for our move.

We're relocating from Boston to Florida in June, not much time to save $10000, which is our target.

That said we've only put aside $550.01 but we have things in the works (additional jobs, other streams of income like Ebay and research surveys)

So, we have a long way to go, but I'm confident we can do it. We've been really good about cutting back the times we go out to eat.

As a family of 5 (three children) that price escalates quickly. Even at McDonalds, we can't get out of there without spending a minimum of $30!!

So, there it is... our goal of $10000, by July 1st.

Follow us on our journey - it's going to be some aggressive savings, but I'm confident we can get pretty close!!