Weekly Money Check-Up 7/18/12

(Photo is from My Pretty Pennies)

Hi there! Boy have I been slacking. It's this new job. It keeps me very busy with little downtime for blogging. It's a blessing and a curse, I tell you!

Anyway, hope all is well in your financial worlds. Here's my Weekly Money Check-Up, courtesy of My Pretty Pennies.

1. The most I’ve spent this last week was on a credit card payment. We have one card that we use for living expenses from time to time because it gives us miles. We paid this in full!

2. Today I am thankful for my friends. I don't have a bunch of girlfriends, but a couple of good, real friends. People that will be there if you need them. They live thousands of miles away but I am thankful for them and how they make me laugh!

3. Money can’t buy happiness. One free thing I did last week that made me happy was reading a magazine from cover to cover. One of our fellow bloggers posted about this great deal that Shape magazine was having where you could get 3 years for like $10 or something ridiculous. I purchased a subscription and got to enjoy reading it this weekend. (Not completely free, but almost!)

4. I will consider this week a success if I finish a presentation I'm working on for work. I want this crossed off of my to-do list before our vacation!

5. One recipe I want to try soon is  something Atkins based. I don't have one selected, but we are eating very few carbs and could really use a new recipe to spice things up a bit. This is motivating me to go online and find one!

Cash Only Living!

 (Photo Credit)

I love cash only living!

I have a routine that I enjoy. My hubby is paid twice per month. We use part of his paycheck to live off of. After I drop him off at work, I make a trip by our local bank and withdraw $120 for each week. We're currently living on a budget of $60 for food and $60 for gas. It was $100 until we moved a little further away from work. We just added the extra $20 so we had a little buffer for additional gas.

For some reason, I just love getting the cash in my hand and sectioning it off in my wallet. After that I typically go fill up our gas tank for the week. I find comfort in this routine. I like paying cash and knowing my boundaries. When it's gone, it's gone.

Weekly Money Check-Up 7/10/12

(Photo is from My Pretty Pennies)

Here's my Weekly Money Check-Up, courtesy of My Pretty Pennies.

1. The most I’ve spent this last week was on our trip to the casino, $600 down the drain.

2. Today I am thankful for good mpg in my car! I love that my car gets 30+ miles per gallon. It came in handy today when I was trying to make it to the gas station before I ran out!

3. Money can’t buy happiness. One free thing I did last week that made me happy was spending some time in our backyard and our tropical oasis. The weather was great on Saturday, so we spent some time in our yard sunning and enjoying the pool. It was so wonderful and relaxing! I hope we can do it again this weekend :-)

4. I will consider this week a success if I continue to eat healthy and work out on a regular basis. So far, so good! 

5. This week I am looking forward to getting paid. It'll be my first official paycheck with my new salary since my promotion. I'm anxious to see what the new number is so I can put it in our budget spreadsheet for the rest of this year! I'm such a dork.

Easy come, easy go!

You'd think that after almost 2 years of blogging about being better with our money and appreciating the small victories we have of finding an extra $35 or coming in under budget, that we wouldn't go blow our money so foolishly.

As I mentioned in a previous post, we moved recently. This meant that we would be getting a deposit back from our previous place. We did a great job taking care of and cleaning our unit when we left, so our landlord kindly returned our deposit IN FULL! Imagine our surprise. We were so excited to know that we would have another $600 to put towards our bills.

Yeah, I'm not really sure what happened with that idea, but before you know it, we were hanging around on Saturday night and out of boredom I guess, we decided to swing by our local casino. Bad idea. We blew our "extra $600" on one night out. It wasn't really even much fun for us since the place was packed, super smokey and we never really got up any. 

The whole next day both my hubby and I had sick feelings in our stomachs, thinking of what we could have should have done with that money instead. Easy come, easy go I guess. I just hope we make smarter decisions in the future.

I love coming in under budget!

So, before we get to enjoy our vacation, we have a wedding to attend. I had budgeted $100 for a nice dress for the event. I lucked out yesterday when I went shopping for one and only ended up spending $50 total.

I came in $50 under budget!

Believe it or not, I actually ended up getting 3 dresses for that price! We have a store called "Ross" out here that is similar to a Marshall's or T.J.Maxx. The prices are much less than you'd pay at other stores. I could have easily gone somewhere else and paid 3X that amount. I'm very excited and now I have options to choose from :-) Plus, with the extra $50 we now have, maybe the hubby and I will dress up and go out for a (cheap) night on the town!

$35 Extra... Woo-hoo!

I hope you all had a nice Independence Day! We watched the fireworks here in San Diego, which if you heard on the news, there was a little mishap. I guess all of the fireworks went off at the same time. It was quite a display of beautiful colors! It just didn't last long. Oh well, there's always next year :-)

So, I was pleasantly surprised when I looked at our budget spreadsheet today and discovered that I had put our final electricity bill in twice! That's an extra $35 in our budget that we didn't expect. Woo-hoo!

I hope I continue to get excited about these little monetary wins long after we've paid all of our debt off.

My Weekly Money Check-Up! 7/3/12

(Photo is from My Pretty Pennies)

Hi there! Long time, no blog :(

Boy, have I missed you all! Being away from here, I realized how therapeutic writing can really be for me. In addition, blogging about my money helps keep me on track for success. I need to continue to find ways to fit it into my schedule.

Anyway, it's been almost a whole month since I've blogged! It's been a pretty busy month. I traveled to two of our other facilities, in addition to a conference. I'm starting to rack up the frequent flyer miles and hotel rewards :-) It's funny how when your job doesn't include traveling, you think it's so glamorous and get excited about the opportunity to do it, but after one bad or aggravating trip, your mood can change. That being said, none of my trips were bad (yet!), I just realized how it could grow old - fast.

So, you may have noticed that there's been some changes to my status update (see the right side of the page >>>). We finished paying off credit card #2! That brings us to over $43K paid towards our debt. It felt amazing to make the final payment on that card this past Friday. I wanted to get on here so bad and share it with you all. But, as life would have it, things got busy.

Also, over the past month we moved! We are now renting a small cottage. Our rent did increase a bit, but so did our happiness and you can't put a price tag on that :-) Believe it or not, we moved from our small studio of 525 square feet to an EVEN SMALLER furnished cottage that comes in around 400 square feet. Somehow it seems larger though. It could be because the furniture is smaller than what we have or that the layout is better with a separate bedroom and walk in closet. We're not sure, but we love it. This place is "all inclusive", so our electricity, cable and internet are all included. (I'm excited because we get all the movie channels now! I can indulge my passion for movies more often.) We also get to enjoy having our own little oasis, with a tropical backyard and pool/hot tub set up. It's really nice to not have anyone above or beside us. We could get used to this! It's making us reconsider buying anything really big now that we've seen how small we can comfortably live in.

On the money front, I have some small updates to share... In about 2 years of blogging, I finally hit $100 earned from Google. Yippee. I received a deposit of $103 in my checking account and put it right towards our debt. I didn't get into this to make money, so it didn't matter that it took so long. It was just a nice perk of being able to share my financial journey with you all. Another small money change was that my car insurance went down by about $100 per year since we moved to a safer area. Unfortunately that savings was eaten up by the fact that we now have to have renter's insurance. The good news is that it is almost a complete wash... our car/renter's insurance combo only increased our monthly bill by about $5 a month.

Here's My Weekly Money Check-Up, courtesy of My Pretty Pennies.

1. The most I’ve spent this last week was on our final payment to credit card #2!

2. Today I am thankful for my hubby. He is a great partner. We're counting the days until our trip later this month and are both looking forward to dropping a few pounds. It makes it easier when you have a supportive partner who is willing to eat the healthy stuff and put the time in for exercise. I am thankful for his support.

3. Money can’t buy happiness. One free thing I did last week that made me happy was ate my lunch over near a local dog park and watched the owners with their pets and kids running around. It was a  peaceful and enjoyable way to have my lunch.

4. I will consider this week a success if I exercise each day. As I mentioned above, we are trying to lose a few more pounds before our vacation and the plan is to walk each night after work. I will consider this week a success if I do!

5. This July 4th I am  probably going to have a cookout, get some exercise and watch the fireworks. We've moved to a new town, so I'm curious to see their display. Fireworks are one of my favorite things, so I hope it's a spectacular show!

Happy 4th of July!