Friday Celebration Post -the first!

[jamethiel]

I start early because I am early! It's the end of the week! Let Joy and Celebration be unconfined!

Come and tell me--what progress have you made towards your goals this week? Finances OR frugal living, or even buying something that you've saved up towards!

Comments

[jamethiel]

I made a payment towards my credit card. As of today, my credit card debt is under $1000 and going to stay there and it's 72% paid. AND I've put some more in my house fund. How about you?

[holyschist]

Awesome!

[jamethiel]

Thank you! I'm so excited by this. When I started, I was 3.5 grand in debt and making payments made me CRY because nothing seemed to make any difference. But persistence and keeping at it has gotten it down!

[bewize]

Wow! That is very impressive! Well done!

[lasergirl]

Oh, man, that's a good question.

Hmm. I have received the last T4 I needed so I can get my tax stuff together...

I started a new job and I'm getting paid the first payment next week... but I have to spend $120 on materials for the project out of my own pocket...

I also finished another contract that will pay $230 towards my unpaid bills.

I.. learned how to cook wontons this week so I don't have to do order-out Chinese anymore! That sounds nice and positive.

[jamethiel]

I don't know what a T4 is, but preparation is great! Sometimes it's the tedious organisational stuff that stops you from doing something, so getting it out of the way is huge! Also, yay for paying off bills.

Mmm, wontons! You'll have to share the recipe!

[lasergirl]

T4s are the forms Canadians get when they work as many jobs as I do a year - it's a record of all your hours, wages, position, etc. Theoretically I could also save them for Unemployment but as they never amount to the minimum required (900+ hours) that's kind of a bust.

Anyway... I need them for taxes because my life is complicated.

[holyschist]

Oooh, wontons! Did you make them from scratch? Soup or fried?

I adore wonton soup and have never been able to get the hang of making it (plus I don't much like frozen wontons, so I'd have to learn to make the wontons AND the broth).

[lasergirl]

Well I wanted to see how those wonton wrappers worked, so I bought a package... everything else I did from scratch (including farmer's market "happy" pork).

There's an entry on my journal, go HERE to check it out.

I used mushrooms and green onions for the broth (with the help of some soya sauce and sesame oil) so it's a little darker than the usual takeout.... but it is LOADS OF DELICIOUS.

I figure you can also make veggie wontons with TVP provided you still use egg white as a binder and make really sure that your pockets are sealed.

[holyschist]

Oooh, that looks fantastic. *memories*

[lasergirl]

It's always worth adding a new recipe whenever you start feeling bleah about your cooking... it sure perked me right up!! I'm still obviously not a meat-eater though... I hardly ever cook it, and I've made wontons two weeks in a row and boy, my stomach can tell the difference....

[killing_rose]

I've gathered together my tax stuff so that I can do all my taxes and dividend stuff while I'm home in three days. (Otherwise, I will *never* have the time.)

And I let myself buy two new books because I was good and didn't buy earrings that were more than double that price.

And I've managed to use up most of the food in my fridge before we have to unplug it for the break.

[jamethiel]

yay taxes! I have made a promise to myself that the MINUTE I get my statement from work I will book time on the computer to do my tax that weekend. Should be easy *crosses fingers*

Also, yay food using!

[inkstone]

My uncle dropped off my tax returns. (He does them for me every year.) I reviewed them, filled out the missing information and mailed them off. I'm due a very decent refund this year (largely due to the fact that I bought a townhouse last year & was a first time homebuyer) so that'll be something nice to replenish my bank account.

My kitchen renovation started this week. And while this does involve spending money (a good amount too since I pretty much gutted everything except for the floor!), I feel satisfied because I set a target budget when I first started planning & canvassing back in late January and pretty much hit it.

I spent many years saving up to buy a place of my own so it feels very good to see that goal not really reach fruition but to have my own personal vision of what a place of my own should look and feel like become reality. So for all the people saving up money for mortgage down payments and the like, be strong and keep your head down. I promise you it will feel very, very good.

[jamethiel]

Wow, that's fantastic. As of now I have... $243 in my home deposit fund. But given that I didn't have ANYTHING a couple of months ago, it's progress.

It's so hard to make progress on really big things. They just get overwhelming. Would you consider doing a post on how to keep your motivation when you've got a long way to go?

[inkstone]

I'll see if I can come up with something! I think I'm a frugal person by nature and was greatly advantaged by the fact that my parents taught me the dangers of credit cards at an early age so I never fell into that trap (and I can easily see how people could considering how hard credit cards were pushed during my first year of college on campus!) and graduated from college with no student loans to pay off, so my advice might not be useful to everyone but I'll see what I can pull together.

[inkstone]

*only, not really. Good grief, that completely changes the meaning of the sentence!

[holyschist]

That's so exciting! Kitchens are such an important part of a house, and I bet it will be amazing to have your perfect kitchen.

[inkstone]

I didn't really change much because I really liked my kitchen's layout -- it's what made me fall in love with the townhouse in the first place. It gets lots of natural light. It has a bay window. It has an enormous breakfast nook. But it was just old and outdated and there was quite a bit of dead, wasted space. The basic layout's still the same, just that some things have been shifted to give me more countertop and cabinet space. The kitchen area itself is small but it's very functional and maintains that lovely cooking triangle that's so often forgotten about these days! (Even my parents' kitchen, in a house built in the early 90s, doesn't have the cooking triangle and it's so inconvenient to walk around an island to get from the fridge to the sink!)

[holyschist]

A lot of kitchens don't seem to be very well-suited for regular use; it's unfortunate.

Natural light! I long for natural light in a kitchen.

[holyschist]

I am 2/3 switched over to a credit union with better interest rates and fewer/lower fees! (The parts that aren't switched over: automagic payments, which I'm going to set up tonight, and my credit card balance--which I screwed up on and which will take a while to sort out, but will ultimately involve ~ -17% in my APR, making the credit card the least of my debt concerns!)

I talked to my broker about investing my inherited IRA to actually earn money--ironically, despite being a poor semi-employed student living paycheck to paycheck and buried in student and car loan debt, I have a great retirement account. I just didn't have the energy to deal with it AND my thesis after my dad died. So now that I'm almost done with school, I got that set up, and asked for the minimum distribution forms, which I would like to do now to give me a little more cushion as I look for a FT job.

I also sat down and looked at my schedule for the next two months: I have a short-term temp project and a part-time job with really flexible hours, so I figured out how to fit everything together. I'll basically be working full-time, which is good, although I need to get more job applications out, too. (I'm just finishing up grad school--the other factor is finishing the last things I need to get done by the end of March, so I can focus on earning money and finding a FT job.)

I dedicated a big chunk of this week into getting my finances in order and have been making good progress so far, although I'm saving big stuff like taxes for this weekend! So I'm trying not to kick myself too much about the screwup.

I've been doing better this week about not eating out! I think I'm going to try a dinner-at-home-for-a-month challenge or some variant. And be better about telling the partner that if he doesn't want to scrounge or cook, he can go out by himself; I need to eat less junk food and I can't afford it (neither can he, but I also can't control his financial choices). I am foreseeing a lot of giant batches of pasta in our future!

[jamethiel]

Yay! Let us know when you're done with the credit union stuff and we'll raise a glass in your honour!

Also, good on you for taking up the challenge of eating at home for a month! Just remember, cheap can be really good food. Being enthused about cooking is fun!

I think everybody makes mistakes about finances at one time or another. Witness the amount of debt I got into before I decided not to be in it! But every mistake is recoverable from, given time and a little effort. Let us know how you go!

[holyschist]

Haha, I could so be done already if I hadn't been stupid. It's kind of stressing me out. But hopefully by next week.

I love cooking, and I prefer eating at home; I've just had an awful couple years and got out of the habit (and I have frustrations about the partner who is good for prep work but rarely for actually producing the meal, too). But I'm just going to have to get back in the habit.

I'm embarrassed to admit to what my credit card debt is (worse than yours was, better than some), but I'll pay it off eventually; it is nothing next to the student or car loans (both of which will end up higher interest), so I'm not that worried, just looking at loan payments for a long time.

[jamethiel]

Trying to work around other people in the kitchen is hard!

Sympathies on the debt. Keep plugging away at it. If you can pay more than the minimum, you'll get there eventually. For me, the hardest thing to do about it was decide to do something about it and then work out a sustainable plan that was a good compromise between quickest repayment and still having a life. Once I'd done it for a while it was just routine. It took a while until it felt like I saw results though.

[holyschist]

I'd feel much more comfortable if I had a FT job; the payments are fairly manageable when I'm employed, but the temporary stuff I have right now is temporary, and the job search is super-stressful. If I end up unemployed for more than a month (if that), I'm not sure what I'll do, since I'm not even remotely eligible for unemployment.

But I'm trying not to dwell on that.

[bewize]

Call the CC companies. A lot of them will work with you to get more manageable payments. They'd rather do that than end up getting nothing if you declare bankruptcy!

[kyrielle]

Hmm. If your partner is good at prep work - what about dishes? I've had fairly good luck getting my husband to play sous chef and dish washer on some of my cooking runs....

[holyschist]

Yeah, he does the dishes half the time or less.

Part of the issue is that he views chopping stuff as contributing equally to the meal (it isn't) and part of the issue is that he works skewed hours, so unless I want to eat at 9:30pm every night (which we often end up doing, and I hate it), I have to do most or all of the prep and cooking before he gets home. And it makes me grumpy.

I haven't really come up with a solution for this all yet, other than lots of pasta (and that's still eating at 8:30 at best, unless I cook it all before he gets home, and then 8:00).

[kyrielle]

:( Yeah. That makes it hard. I cook and freeze on weekends, reheat weekday evenings, but that doesn't solve the distribution of labor issue, just moves mine. (Of course, in my case it DOES help as then my husband is home to clean up the detritus.)

[kyrielle]

My kitchen is fully of foodstuffs just bought! This doesn't sound quite like progress, except that everything I bought tonight was on the list, and 90% of it gets used tomorrow in a big cook-and-freeze bash. (Along with about an equal volume of things-I-already-had-and-gee-I-should-use-that-up....)

I thought of three more recipes in the store. I didn't buy the ingredients for any of them, since I have already planned enough that I think I will be tired of cooking when I am done tomorrow, and would just not get around to any more.

[kyrielle]

I am inordinately proud of myself now. I have, either in the freezer quick-freezing or in the fridge cooling down for same, 12 servings (maybe more) worth of chicken noodles, 4 servings of plain noodles (cooked in broth), 10 burritos (chicken and black bean), 7 tortilla pizzas, 11 cups of chicken broth, and enough chunk and shredded chicken for probably 10-12 sandwiches. I also have a couple bell peppers (bought more than needed for the pizza) sliced to eat, and a loaf of foccaccia bread.

I still have more tortillas to cook up (purely because when I bought tortillas, the big container with half again as much as I needed was on sale for slightly less than the amount I needed in smaller containers), which I'll do tomorrow or Sunday, but this has been very productive.

But I do need to find the noodles-only container, as I think I mislabelled it as containing chicken and noodles. Heh.

[jamethiel]

Congrats! I kind of... had an amazingly busy weekend, but I'll do a menu and shopping list next week.

[red_trillium]

Hn, one step forward one step back for me? I somehow managed to botch the bills last pay and had one payment not go out. I don't know how, I thought I had enough in the account for it but I must have missed something.

BUT partly because of that and partly because of trying to pull our finances under control I've gotten better at bills & have a list of our finances on the fridge.

And unrelated but another finance hopefully soon to be good: I called to take our finance company off our insurance since we'd paid our car off about 5 or 6 months ago. I found out they are charging us a premium based on our purchase price (used but about 5 or 6 years ago) and I can call our old dealer & get info on the current market value and have our premiums dropped! This would be good. They also sent a brochure so I can go through all our stuff and see if the level that we are insured at is right for us (if not...another drop in premium).

[jamethiel]

Baby steps! Even if you make mistakes, if you learn from them it's all good! And here's hoping the insurance company drops your premiums!

[red_trillium]

That's true. And I'm trying to work on keeping better track of our bills without having to do them every day so I think my recent idea of keeping a paper with our limits & available balances as well as where we are at in our account might help.

[bewize]

I feel like this is cheating, because for the first time in two years, I had a FANTASTIC financial week. I settled a BIG case and made a chunk of money (just started my own firm, was laid off a year + ago). With this money, I'm going to be able to pay off a LOT of my debt.

I'm almost hysterical with glee!

[jamethiel]

That's really great! It's wonderful that your hard work is starting to pay off!