photo credit: Civisi

Hope everyone had a joyous Christmas as well as a safe and wonderful New Years! Most of my free time this month was spent doing as much family stuff as can be squeezed into the ridiculously cold weather December decided to throw at us. But since we live in the Midwest, it’s not as if winter is a surprise or anything…

As I mentioned last time, my efforts at earning a little extra are paying off in a fairly major way. December took November’s successes and handily passed even that success up in a way that boggles my mind. The earnings have slowed down in the last ten days or so, as I expected. But now that I’ve got a taste of the potential out there, I’m hooked, and am excited to get cracking in ’09!

When my assorted commissions started coming in in mid-December, I must be entirely honest: we blew some of it going ever so slightly overboard with our gift giving. We budget a bit every month for Christmas gifts throughout the year (’cause Christmas isn’t a surprise, you know!), but decided to add a chunk to that total when I saw how things were going. Even though we had it to spare, it still felt a little odd going off budget.

But most of the excess went to doing some heavy damage to our debt. Which was a lot more fun than it sounds like! I decided to check this month’s running total a few days before the end of December, and saw I was a couple hundred dollars short of a big number. So Chase got paid twice this time around. Because when I realized how close we were, I just had to see five figures disappear in a month!

Let the blood letting begin!

photo credit: ToniVC

Summer has finally made itself fully known, and walking outside is like walking into a sauna. Which is fine if I wanted a sauna, but not so fine if I just wanted to go for a walk. So, what better time to break out ye’ olde spreadsheet and see what kind of progress was made in killing off debt last month?

Summer always seem to be a little more expensive for us than other times of the year. After all, when it’s snowing and 7 degrees, we are perfectly content not wandering much and just staying warm inside here at home.

But it being a beautiful summer, we felt like wandering a bit. We made our annual pilgrimage to my extended family reunion, and decided to take a couple extra days to see my wife’s brother nearby while we were in the area. We did do a budget for the vacation, but it being one of those things we didn’t regularly budget for in the past (otherwise known as everything), we didn’t end up budgeting enough. A couple extra meals out, a few too many trips to the coffee shop, some random spending, and the bottom line showed us a couple hundred overspent.

I was a little disappointed, but wasn’t extraordinarily bothered by it. My wife? Borderline stroke. I had no idea how deeply the get-out-of-debt bug I brought home had bitten her! A few serious conversations about our goals and progress and such, and she relaxed a bit while also imbuing in me a little extra motivation to kick a few things into higher gear…

photo credit: Daveybot

Spring ends, summer begins, more debt goes to the great beyond. Isn’t it a wonderful thing?

Yet another month of incremental debt killing. While I could have boosted the damage done to the final tally a bit by using returns from my expanding online marketing side business, right now I’m comfortable using the funds to reinvest in what’s been working. Maybe next month I’ll throw the excess at the debt, but for now having the ability to use the play I have in that side business’s cash flow to experiment has proven useful.

Likewise, I’m sure we could have trimmed more, but going over our spending versus the budget it looks like we did a little comfort spending in June. In the end, it is just money, and we needed a little cheering up more than we needed to knock a couple hundred more off the total, so c’est la vie. Speaking of, we are still waiting to hear on medical bills associated with our loss. Since we have a pretty substantial deductible, unless medical procedures have gotten cheap all of a sudden, the ol’ total is almost certainly going to suffer a brief reversal soon.

Anyway, for those into specifics, here ya’ go:

Yet another reason to avoid giving out those gift cards that everyone seems to love:

photo credit: untitledprojects

Tens of millions of dollars in gift cards and certificates became worthless overnight in the wake of the Sharper Image’s financial plight — and customers holding those cards have little recourse.

Federal law allows a company to stop honoring store gift cards when it files Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and that’s exactly what’s happening at San Francisco-based Sharper Image. Sales clerks are telling customers they can no longer accept the plastic cards as payment, and the cards are no longer accepted when customers try to use them online.

Hope you didn’t wait too long to go out and grab your personal foot massager/fancy nose hair trimmer/overpriced adult games early!

Or so says Consumer Reports!

I glanced down at the odometer of my lil’ Saturn SL1 and saw it slowly but surely creeping up on the 200,000 mile mark. Still a few thousand miles to go, but it won’t be too long. Still purrs like a kitten – despite the Check Engine Soon light that comes on periodically ever since we got her – and would love to see the thing hit another couple hundred thousand.

But, alas, not counting on it, so I occasionally take the casual stroll through the Cars for Sale section of the local classified, if only to get an idea what a good used vehicle might set me back. More than once a temptation has popped up, but I’ve always been the type to drive a car into the ground before bothering to replace it.