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Archive for January, 2010

30 in 30

January 18th, 2010 at 03:21 am

I'm a little late to the party, but I'm joining in today.

I had a huge box of clothes (like a moving box you can hang them in) stuffed with clothes that has been taking up room in our bedroom for over a year now. I went through it, and found:
- 17 things to throw away
- 25 T-shirts to cut up into rags
- 2 shirts to cut up and use for a craft project
- 54 clothing items to give to mom/brothers/sisters (! Yeah, I know)

I also hadn't gotten rid of a bunch of financial "trash" that I don't like to just throw out with the regular trash. It should be shredded, but I don't have a shredder, so I'll take it over to mom and dad's and burn it. Add them:
- 4 bags financial trash

My cousin had gotten me a new wallet for Christmas, and I hadn't transferred anything over to it yet...the old one's zipper had broken, so I was using a rubber band to hold it together. Transferred that, so add another thing to throw out.

Totals:
19 x 1 = 19
81 x 1.5 = 121.5
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140.5 points

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Found the old brother ink cartridge that worked with my printer...I replaced it with a generic, but the generic didn't work for some reason. So I am going to try to suck the ink out of the full one and put it into the brother one, and see if that works. If not, I'll buy a new one, but might as well try.

My goals for 2010

January 1st, 2010 at 08:29 pm

My goals for the year are to pay off Capital One (~$1500), my student loan (~$2500) and DH's grandma ($2400).

On 11/01, I had wanted to pay off the house this year as well, but I got that paid off last week! If you remember, the little screw up with the student loan was going to push that goal to next month, but I decided that the federal government will NOT have an effect on me. I will achieve my goals in spite of them. If you remember, I was at $1150 and needed $1300. I paid the chiropractor with the cash I had been doling out to DH (the cash came from our hunters) and used $150 out of gas/food, and voila! $1300. I DID pay off the house in 1 month! Take that feds. Your bureaucracy won't keep me down!

I will get the chiropractor money ($141) back from my HSA. I turned the receipt in to the administrator, and should get paid back sometime next month. That will go on the stack as well.

I am going to keep building up my snowball (currently $420 a month), and when those three loans above are done, start on BoA. That won't get done next year, but I will be knocking it around at least.

I am going to buy more laptops to resell. Easy money; just have to get to Wichita to pick them up initially. I made about $45 per laptop last time I did that.

I am going to offer to help a lady in town that does taxes. She has a daughter that plays basketball, and my brother and sister play basketball as well, so Tuesday, Thursday and Friday is out, but if she works late on Monday and Wednesday, I could go straight there after work and help her out for a few hours. She would pay about $10 per hour, and all of that could go to the debt snowball. I helped her a while last summer and like it, but events interfered and I stopped going.

Also this year, instead of putting receipts in a pile to be sorted through later, I am going to take care of them when I balance checkbooks. I take farm receipts from the stores and tape them to paper (so they are easy to look through), scan them (so I have a backup) and then hole punch them to put in a notebook. Some of those store receipts fade, so having a scan of them will be important if anything ever comes up where I need them down the road. I will also come up with a spreadsheet where I can keep track of the expenses through out the year.

Because of all the machinations I had to go through to pay the house off in a month, I can only put $210 towards Capital One on 1/13. Minimum is $44, so 5 times more than I was paying. By 2/13, though, I can for sure send $420, plus any money from over budgeting. There are 6 bills that will probably be over-budgeted for, so all the extra will go.

I will also sweep my gas and food account to the special emphasis bill each pay period. I got paid yesterday. Excuse me while I go balance that check book...ok, I'm back. Only $15.34 left to sweep from last pay period, but I need to ask for reimbursement for $95.70, which was another Doctor bill. I'm going to go through this $500 HSA pretty quickly...

On 11/21, I figured I would have all the credit card debt paid off by 5/2014. With the house paid off early, that knocks it back to 2/2014. I am not taking into account interest in those figures, but I'll just keep on tracking it like this. If I'm consistent with tracking it, at least it will show progress, even if interest will extend it a bit...but the interest would extend all data points, so the rate of progress would be the same.

I'll do farm goals after Tuesday. We sell calves Tuesday, and I'll have to make sure to cover a lot of big bills: main farm loan, line of credit, planter payment, swather payment, rent payment. Eek. I don't want to think about it right now.

At work we have an option to submit our medical insurance premiums for reimbursement from the HSA. I can't figure out why this would make sense to do. We pay $55.17 per pay period for insurance, and $25 per pay period for the 125 Health. They are both taken out of the check and are not included as federal taxable wages. Now, if I was going to get reimbursed for the $55.17 per pay period, wouldn't that mean I would just increase the reimbursement money to $80.17 and get that $55.17 back the next month? What is the point? Am I missing something? There is no tax reason to do this. But, maybe, that would allow for a bit more of a buffer. I just put enough in there to cover the deductible for me, because I am hoping to have lots of dr appointments sometime this year (you know, pregnancy test, ultrasounds, etc) and DH won't go to the doctor unless his foot is hanging off. If I put more in the account, but then didn't use it all, I could just submit the medical premiums and get the money back. Hmm. I'll have to think about that for next year's open enrollment.

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SIL is pregnant with her. Hmmph. Well, she has had two miscarriages, so this is her third pregnancy. The others were lost early (before 2 months) and she is now about 5 months along. I don't know how to say that. When he is born, is it her first child? Her third child? As a mother only to one miscarried child myself, I don't know how to put it. Anyway, I started thinking about shower gifts and such, so I started looking in the baby aisle, and holy crap, things are expensive. But I found the cutest flannel fabric of a frog on camoflouge, for $3 a yard, and I got all 5 yards of it. I wanted it to be reversible, but I couldn't find any red flannel at Alco, but DH had a flannel shirt that had shrunk and he couldn't wear it anymore, so that is the back. Of course I washed and dried both the material and the flannel shirt before starting:


My sister had given me some baby clothes, so I drug that out and found a bib to make a pattern from. It is really small. I decided to make two of these really small ones, and then two of medium sized ones and two large ones.

The frogs are so cute. I cut one large frog out to applique to the red side of one bib and two small ones to applique to the red side of the other. I used a decorative stitch around the outside when I was done, and here is what they look like:



It only took an evening. I have lots of frog material left, so I think I'll make a swaddling blanket and more bibs, but I need to find more red material before I can make the blanket.