Living for today - Planning for Tomorrow
I was just reading an article about Cortney Munna. She has $97,000 in college debt and is struggling to pay it back and is questioning her decision to amass the debt in the first place. The article talks a lot about who is responsible. At one point in the article the author questions New York University’s actions and wonders why they didn’t tell Cortney to
We’ve always been a bit guilty of eating out more than we should. Over the last couple years we’ve actually scaled back quite a bit. It’s hard to go drop $40+ on a meal when you know you could eat MUCH cheaper at home. The problem with eating at home has been that we aren’t very creative about making meals. This leads to boring meat/starch/vegetable
We’re just about to pull the trigger on canceling our home phone service. I have resisted canceling our phone because I have used it a lot for work, since I work out of the house. Recently, I received a VOIP phone number and a Plantronics USB headset for my work laptop and it is working very well. I’m on a pilot at our company which
Blu-ray, Blu-ray, Blu-ray. It seems everyone is excited about Blu-ray. Personally, I’m not sure what the fuss is about. From my perspective, from what I’ve seen, it seems to be an overpriced new media format that doesn’t really seem to improve the quality “that†much. I have watched the sample Blu-ray movies in various stores when I’m out shopping and I really can’t see a
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately peering in to my personal finance spreadsheet. This is the spreadsheet that shows all of our major assets, our income, our expenses and our liabilities. The assets and liabilities really haven’t changed much. Here’s a quick rundown of the major stuff: House: $340K Lake House: $155K Toyota Truck: $9K Honda CRV: $24K Boat: $8K Yamaha Quad: $4.5K
I’ve been considering killing off cable TV at our house for the last year or so. Today I finally took the plunge and called Comcast. I think what finally caused me to do it was receiving our last cable bill. Our discounts had dropped off and the bill was back up to $110 for cable and Internet. The same day I happened to read an
My wife and I were evaluating what we could do for a short vacation while our daughter is off for spring break and we’ve decided to head to Lake Havasu Az. The flight is booked and the rental car is reserved. All we need to do now is sit back and wait to leave. While we are down there, I’m planning on doing a bit
I think I may have some sort of split personality disorder. While I’ve been working hard to lock down our spending, I’ve also found myself “giving in†to a few desires. One of those desires is a new 47†LCD TV from Costco. For the last 7 years we’ve been using the old picture tube TV that was in our house when we bought it.
February was a quick month, as it always is. Normally I’d expect it would be an average or below average month for income. This February turned out to be one of our higher income months and it wasn’t even a “3 paycheck†month for us. A combination of factors helped boost our income this month and helped us add a solid $5500 to our savings
It’s been a tough week. There’s really no other way to put it. Layoffs at work have hit closer to home than they ever have before and the overall mood in the office is absolutely horrible. Since last Friday I’ve been slowly hearing about many friends and really good employees that have been given their layoff slips. Why? Because the company has decided to try
