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Sunday Roundup: Spent weekend
The problem with running a training class for a side hustle is that it sucks up half of my weekend, whenever I hold a class. I like my weekends. Unfortunately for downtime, I like extra money more.
30 Day Project Update
This month, I am trying to do 100 perfect push-ups in a single set. I’m recording each session in a spreadsheet. I am currently up to 50 in a set and 175 in a session, spread across 5 sets. This week, my elbow started hurting, so I took 2 and a half days off.
Weight Loss Update
I am on the Slow Carb Diet. At the end of the month, I’ll see what the results were and decide if it’s worth continuing. For those who don’t know, the Slow Carb Diet involves cutting out potatoes, rice, flour, sugar, and dairy in all their forms. My meals consist of 40% proteins, 30% vegetables, and 30% legumes(beans or lentils). There is no calorie counting, just some specific rules, accompanied by a timed supplement regimen and some timed exercises to manipulate my metabolism. The supplements are NOT effedrin-based diet pills, or, in fact, uppers of any kind. There is also a weekly cheat day, to cut the impulse to cheat and to avoid letting my body go into famine mode.
I’m measuring two metrics, my weight and the total inches of my waist , hips, biceps, and thighs. Between the two, I should have an accurate assessment of my progress.
Weight: I have lost 38 pounds since January 2nd. That’s 2 pound since last week.
Total Inches: I have lost 22.5 inches in the same time frame, down 1.5 inches since last week. My biceps, which are part of this measurement, have grown half an inch each since I started doing push-ups twice a day.
Best Posts
My mother-in-law hates dandelions, with a passion that just isn’t sane. I want to make her a meal that consists of nothing but dandelions.
When I got my first RSA SecureID card, I thought it was the coolest thing ever. If you’ve never had one, it gives you a rotating password that changes every 30 seconds, so nobody can guess you password for long. It was neat, and, apparently, not that secure.
The idea of a tortoise on wheels makes me smile.
I’d like to try to make yogurt. I can try whatever flavors I like. Poptart-and-broccoli yogurt just sounds….
I work really hard to save money on vacations, and this post is full of good ideas to help me do that.
eBay is making changes to their fee structure that will make it a lot cheaper to sell things. I’m guessing the back-the-customer-no-matter-what-at-the-expense-of-the-seller’s-getting-scammed policy was costing them some money.
The big box stores are pushing for Amazon to collect sales tax on all sales, in opposition to a Supreme Court ruling on the topic. It won’t make a difference in sales. Amazon will still be cheaper. And I’ll get a Canadian mail drop.
LRN Timewarp
This is where I review the posts I wrote a year ago. Did you miss them then?
I talked about teaching my kids the joy of delayed gratification. Interestingly, my son has since decided he doesn’t want an XBox 360, because the buy-in is too high, with having to buy games and controllers to match the console. We’ve also changed his allowance to savings ratio. Now, 25% of everything he makes hits his bank account. The rest is his to do with as he sees fit.
Last year at this time, it was scam week here. I wrote a post on debt scams and another on disaster scams.
Carnivals I’ve Rocked and Guest Posts I’ve Rolled
Money Problems: Boosting Your Income was included in the Totally Money Carnival.
Living in Debt: How I Sacrificed My Future was included in the Carnival of Personal Finance.
My post on spendthrift whiners was hosted on Faith and Finance. In return, I hosted his post on paper statement fees.
Thank you! If I missed anyone, please let me know.
Yakezie Blog Swap
Jacob hosted the Yakezie Blog Swap, which is a bunch of bloggers writing on the same topic and sharing the posts with each other. Here is his list of the participants this round.
He wrote about 3 of my financial pet peeves (spending too much money on drinks, financing expensive furniture, and active investing strategies) on Narrow Bridge Finance.
Robert from The College Investor wrote about how people making mistakes with their 401k accounts is a big “no-no” at Thousandaire.Narrow Bridge Finance posted about how people not taking responsibility for their financial actions infuriates him on My Personal Finance Journey.Prairie Eco-Thrifter posted about how sales tax is her biggest financial pet peeve at 101 Centavos.101 Centavos posted about how wasting food makes his blood pressure rise at Prairie Eco-Thrifter.
LaTisha D Styles writes about how greedy banks upset her at Retire by 40.Retire by 40 wrote about how bigger is not necessarily better at FSYA Online.
Bucksome Boomer writes about how advertisers that hide the real price of a product is maddening at The Single Saver.
The Single Saver wrote about parents who do not teach their children financial responsibility at Bucksome Boomer.
Kevin from Thousandaire writes about people having misconceptions about Roth IRA’s at The College Investor.
Time from Faith and Finance vents about financial institutions charging to send paper account statements, but still send out a plethora of paper junk mail at Live Real Now.
Jason from Live Real Now politely rants about how aggravating it is to see people whine about their less-than-ideal financial situations, yet do nothing about it, at Faith and Finance.
Money Sanity vents about people complaining about paying overdraft and bank fees, while at the same time, having no idea how much credit card debt they have or their checking account balance at The Saved Quarter
The Saved Quarter writes about people who are financially irresponsible and want to complain about how broke they are while showing off the new things they bought at Money Sanity
Barb Friedberg talks about how investment advisors that get paid to sell products (more salesman than investment advisors in my book) upset her at Happy Simple Living
Happy Simple Living writes about how companies and people that exploit others aggravate her at Barb Friedberg Personal Finance.
Get More Out of Live Real, Now
There are so many ways you can read and interact with this site.
You can subscribe by RSS and get the posts in your favorite news reader. I prefer Google Reader.
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You can send me an email, telling me what you liked, what you didn’t like, or what you’d like to see more(or less) of. I promise to reply to any email that isn’t purely spam.
Have a great week!
Money-Saving Tip: Put Your Groceries Away
Last night, we went grocery shopping. I found a beautiful pork roast, just begging to come home with me. It could spend all day Sunday in the smoker. Rub some brown sugar and garlic on the outside, maybe use a mix of maple and cherry wood chips to turn my pork butt into breakfast food. Picture this: a beautiful chunk of slow-cooked pork butt, covered in a candied crust, falling apart at the lightest touch, and tasting faintly of maple syrup.
It was love.
This morning, I woke up, walked into the kitchen to make some breakfast, and saw that beautiful butt sitting on the counter. Room temperature meat, ruined by my negligence. $15 in the trash.
We got back late last night, and apparently set this wonderful piece of future-food down with the non-refrigerated items were were planning to put away later. We said good-bye to the sitter, chased the kids to bed, picked up the house a bit, and forgot about my new love.
I’m sad.
Here’s my advice: When you get home from grocery shopping, immediately put all of the groceries away. Let the kids juggle knives for a bit, if you have to, but get the food put away. If that’s not going to work, at least take it all out of the shopping bags so you can check your work.
There are starving kids in Iowa. Don’t let potential candied pork roast go to waste.
Budget Lesson, Part 6
It’s been a month since I’ve written a post for the budget series, so I’ll be continuing that today. See these posts for the history of this series.
This time, I’ll be reviewing my non-monthly bills. These are the bills that have to be paid, but aren’t due on a monthly basis. Some are annual, some are quarterly.
- School Lunch – This could be cut by sending a bag lunch. We pay about $1.25 per day for school lunch. At that price, I don’t think I can beat the nutrition, let alone the convenience of the meal. We pay this whenever the account gets below $10.
- Property Taxes – We pay this semi-annually. This bill goes up every year due to the ****** ***-******* ******-******* who don’t care about their constituents making ends meet. ******* ***** ******* *******. Huh. Who knew WordPress came with a censor? I could move, but I’d have to get out of commuting distance to get this down much.
- Life insurance – I’ve got two quarterly life insurance policies. I can’t get these much cheaper, but I should be able to next year. The questions asked if I’ve smoked in the last three years, and that will be up on Halloween.
- AAA – It’s only been recently that I’ve owned vehicles reliable enough to avoid paying my AAA dues for me. I could cancel this, but for $80 per year, the hotel discounts make it a wash. One vacation per year comes close to making the difference.
- Vehicle Registration – The only way to cut this would be to get rid of a vehicle. I don’t think that’s possible for us. We work in opposite directions and, for at least one quarter per year, spend too much time chasing around for activities.
- Daycare – We’ve been using our current daycare provider since my oldest(10) was one. When my youngest turns 2 in June, our costs will go down. Without one of us quitting our job, this bill can only go down as the kids grow up.
- City Bill – This bill combines our garbage, water, and sewer. With three adults, three kids, and 5 animals in the house, reducing our garbage level is difficult. We do try to manage our water usage in the summer, to keep that down.
- Web host – I have a few domain names and a hosting package to handle my side hustles and miscellaneous projects. This is a deductible expense. I have been allowing my domain names to expire if the project isn’t being actively pursued.
- Memberships – I have annual dues to two organizations. I’m making payments on lifetime memberships, so these will be going away in about 18 months.
Reviewing this list, there doesn’t seem to be too much I can cut and accomplish any meaningful savings. Am I missing something?
Budget Lesson, Part 1
budget” width=”300″ height=”185″ />Over the next few weeks, I will be going over my budget in detail.
The first section is income, but that’s straightforward. A line for each income source, bi-weekly, monthly and annual totals. Simple.
Before we start, a word on the organization. There are five columns:
- Category – This is the description of the line item.
- Cost – How much do you pay for this item?
- Time – What is the frequency of the payment? Valid values are ‘m’, ‘q’, ‘y’, ‘w’ for ‘Monthly’, ‘Quarterly’, ‘Yearly’ and ‘Weekly’.
- Monthly – Cost and Time are combined to calculate the monthly expense, to make it possibly to budget. If this is $100, I need to set aside a C-Note each and every month to make the payment when it comes due.
- Yearly – This column is mostly informative. It’s helpful to see this in comparison to my annual pay.
The first section I am actually going to address is discretionary spending.
- Groceries/Dining $475.00 – We don’t budget heavily for groceries, which would be a surprise if you saw me. At the smallest I have ever been, fit, I was never small. We shop smart, buy in bulk when it makes sense, and rarely eat out. We also keep cooked rice and beans in containers in the refrigerator as a cheap and healthy way to stretch almost everything we eat.
- Discretionary $250.00 – This gets used for household items, like toilet paper and soap. It also get used for the odd book or movie, or to cover the gaps between the other categories and reality.
- Baby stuff $60.00 – We have two children in diapers. ‘Nuff said. This category does get progressively smaller as the baby items are outgrown and the children get potty-trained.
- Gas/oil $200.00 – Gas and auto-maintenance. This is actually higher than monthly costs, allowing us to set some aside for larger maintenance issues.
- Clothes $15.00 – All of our dressers are overflowing, so this is strictly replacement cost for the time being. Our kids wear a lot of hand-me-downs.
- Blow Money $50.00 – Occasionally, habitual shoppers need to shop. If they don’t do it on-budget, they will do it off-budget and kill the whole idea.
Initially, we used a “virtual envelope” system. We had a spreadsheet and every time something was spent in this category, we entered the amount and stopped when the category was spent. Didn’t work. We are going on a pure, cash-only system as of the first of the year. No money, no spendy.
One Year Later….
In April of 2009, I told my wife we were either going to straighten out our finances or file bankruptcy. At that time, we had $90,394 in total debt, including $30,000 in credit card debt. It hasn’t been easy, but we are working out way out of that hole. Since then, we have paid down more than $30,000. That’s not $30,000 in payments, but $30,000 less debt. We are now less than $60,000 in debt. We have entirely stopped accumulating more and I don’t remember the last time we carried a new balance on a card or had to use our overdraft protection. Next month, my car will be paid off, 10 months early.
Given my new-found fanaticism, I spent the next 6 months or so evangelizing about our debt repayment. Eventually, I decided to share my thoughts and progress with the world and launched this site on December 1, 2009. Today is my anniversary.
Here we are, 234 posts, 695 comments, and 17, 661 spam later. You all rock. Except the spammers.
To say thank you, I’m giving away a $100 Amazon gift card to some lucky reader. Yes, I rock, too.
There are several ways you can enter the drawing:
1. Subscribe to Live Real, Now, either by RSS or email. If you are already subscribed by email, you are automatically entered. To show me you have subscribed by RSS, there is a contest code in the feed. Just post that in the comments. (1 entry)
2. Follow me on twitter and tweet the following: “@LiveRealNow is giving away $100. Come get some! Follow and RT to enter! http://bit.ly/f1roKM #Giveaway #Yakezie” (1 entry possible per day. Every day you retweet this is another entry!)
3. “Like” LRN on Facebook. This is easy, just click the little ‘like’ button on the left. If you’ve already done that, you have already entered once.(1 entry)
4. Send me an email at Jason <AT> LiveRealNow <DOT> net telling me what you would like to see me write about more (or less!). You can also use the contact form. (1 entry)
I’m closing this down on the 15th. That’s 18 possible entries for $100 you may win early enough to help with some last-minute Christmas shopping.
UPDATE:
And the winner is…Claudia! Congratulations. Email sent.
