Layout:
Home > Archive: August, 2017

Archive for August, 2017

Ebates, Meal Plan, Found a Starbucks Card

August 21st, 2017 at 03:14 am

Lots going on in the "very small amounts of money" financial world.

Ebates - I got an email from Ebates that said they are sending me a check for $8.06.

Meal Plan - First week back at school and we planned carefully for breakfast, lunch, snack and dinner!
Breakfasts - bagel/cream cheese, english muffin with slices of cheese, toast with marmite, homemade granola
Lunches - out to the little sandwich place by my office the day before school starts, mains: chimichurri rice with salad, turkey wrap, caprese "sandwich"
Snacks - string cheese, avocado, chocolate milk, cheese and crackers, nuts and fruit, hardboiled egg
Dinners:
- tuna melts with salad
- asian meatballs with rice, rocket salad
- frito pies (special request for the first day of school)
- bad breath pasta and a crostata for dessert
- baked potatoes with broccoli and cheese

Starbucks Card - I found this in my old wallet. No idea if it's expired or has any money on it. I think someone gave it to me as a gift, but I'm not a big starbucks fan. But F likes the cream frappacinos.

Gym Payment - Haven't gotten payment for July yet - grrrr!

New Gym - I am teaching an additional class at another gym in town now, starting next Thursday. Need to update CPR ($25). But they pay more per class, so that's good!

New Phone - No, I am not getting a new phone. TMobile has a deal where they pay you $300 for your trade-in and you get an iphone 7 on installment. My iphone 5 is worth pretty much nothing, so $300 would have been a good deal. But I decided not to do it. D says I should wait until the iphone 8 is out. I am not sure. I'm not good at making purchases and this makes me nervous. Plus I just got a new vacuum cleaner, so that's it for 2017.

A Day at the "Beach"!

August 20th, 2017 at 04:40 am

I know - we don't live anywhere near the ocean. But we do have a beach about half an hour away... it's the beach at Cochiti Lake and it's really fun. It was a $5 parking fee, plus we got salads and sandwiches and cookies at Trader Joe's ($15.96 total).

F starts school next week, so this is our last real summer weekend.

I blew up my floating lounge chair thingy (it really is ridiculous, but so fun) and we set up our camping tent for shade. We hung out in the water, and it was great! It's not a fancy place, but lots of cute kids and nice families.

Right now F is at an end-of-summer pool party at a country club to celebrate her friends' bar and bat mitzvahs earlier in the summer (the did it in NYC where the grandparents are). We got them each a gift certificate to Amazon, but that was paid for with money in the "gifts for others" category. It is fully funded.

I want to figure out something fun (and frugal) for tomorrow, too. Maybe a hike.

OK, need to go pick F up from the party...

Mortgage Paid Off! Weird! And Good! But Weird!

August 13th, 2017 at 10:46 pm

It's been a bittersweet week for me - given all of the things that are going on in the country and the world right now I am really profoundly sad and also scared, but we also paid of the mortgage last Monday.

I haven't felt like writing about it, but this is a blog about money not current events or politics or anything like that, so I am determined to celebrate this huge milestone!

On Monday we went into the bank and paid off the remainder of our mortgage. This is the month that D has three paychecks (he is paid every other week rather than twice a month and we decided to live off two paychecks each month and use the two extra each year as a "bonus"). So we used that extra paycheck plus the amount the bank has in escrow (don't worry, we have saved our own "escrow" for taxes and insurance).

Our bank doesn't charge anything for a payoff statement, and they don't charge anything for payoff except the $30 to record the release of the lien at the County.

I checked into all of this ahead of time. All we owed was the remaining mortgage less the escrow plus $30.

It hasn't really sunk in yet... I guess it will when that mortgage payment DOESN'T come out of our account on the 2nd of next month.

I am now busy drawing up a new budget. According to the YNAB philosophy, "every dollar has a job" even if that job is savings. We have to fund a few categories before the budget is really set (I want to make sure we max our our IRAs before the year is over so that's an extra $600 per month... things like that).

Actually the first time it sort of hit me that this is real was in Trader Joe's today. I usually buy the $2.79 cage free/hormone free eggs, but then I saw the organic/free range eggs for $3.99, and I bought a dozen of those. It's $1.20 more, but I want to see if they are as good as the eggs we used to get in Ireland. And I could make a decision like that, whereas before I never would have.

On the other hand, I am going to get me hair cut next week at Great Clips with a coupon. I don't need to spend money for no reason!

PS - F rode her unicycle into the bank for a festive atmosphere when we went in to pay off our mortgage! It was funny! And we ran into our City Councilor from our district who told us congratulations.

PPS - The other things I did this week are called the insurance company to let them know that we'll now pay for the insurance ourselves. Also made sure that I turned off the mortgage auto-payment on the online banking site. And I still need to contact the County to make sure we get the bill for property taxes and not our bank.