Weekly Cache - 2010, Feb 28
Random Thoughts!
Being Debt Free hasn’t had much of a chance to affect me yet!
My sister had a baby, and my wife volunteered to go down and help out for the first week. We didn’t even get to celebrate paying off the house! It’s nice being totally debt free, but now for the hard part, I’ve basked in the sun long enough… the honeymoon is over! I need to develop some new spreadsheets to figure out what I’m going to do. The spreadsheets will probably be similar to the one in my post about ”My Goal/Dividend Funds“, but I’ll need to create a more ellaborate spreadsheet for the task.
Today, I had my first temptation of Lifestyle Creep! Our school system has cutbacks, like all of the schools in our area, and one of the cuts was the traditional 4th grade trip. Well, more involved parents than we are got together, and started trying things to get the money together for the trip. We really wanted our son to have the experience, so we seriously talked about donating $300 to $400 dollars. While that might not seem like much money to some of you, for us to contribute so much was unheard of! Fortunately, we checked with the fundraisers and they said that they thought that they had enough, so we only contributed $100…
I telecommute once a week, and low and behold, the kids had a snow day on that day! I skipped lunch and left work early to have a bit of outdoor fun with them! It was great, I even noticed myself running in the snow with our dog a few times. Lol, what a sight that must have been! I’m glad my wife didn’t see that! The kids went sledding down our driveway, with me at the foot of the driveway just in case. In case of what, I have no idea, the entire time we were sledding, I think I only saw 2 cars slowly creep by… That’s suburbia for you…
My Favorite Top 5 PF Blogger Posts For The Week:
- Eliminate The Muda‘s post “Combat the Closing Techniques – The Power Of Suggestions” - Was a very interesting post about the tactics that salesman use much like Jedi Mind tricks (those are my words not the Coaches) to trick unwary customer into buying more that what the needed or initially wanted by playing into the customer’s ego!
- Money Honey‘s post “Grass is Greener on the other side“ – Money Honey has some really great articles this week, ranging from her Las Vegas winnings, to knowing a friend of a friend that won a two million dollar house (this beats my close friend that won a $200,000 dollar house)! I liked the Grass post because it was simple and honest, but also wrapped with a deeper and often forgotten lesson inside! I think Financial Samurai‘s friend in Sam’s post called “The Curse Of Making Too Much Money And Not Pursuing Your Dreams” should take heed… but that just my opinion…
- Sweating the Big Stuff‘s “Samurai Alexa Ranking Challenge” spreadsheet is now semi-automated! I’m always a sucker for a sexy spreadsheet with some great figures!!! I bet J.Money from BudgetsAreSexy.com has been ogling Daniel-san’s sweet sweet spreadsheet more than once! Dan’s spreadsheet is a Google app based spreadsheet, and honestly the first time I’ve seen the google spreadsheet being used. I have to say, I’m very impressed!
- My Journal to Millions‘s post “Picking Dividend Aristocrat Stocks” – is perfecting his google apps spreadsheet skills too so he can picking the best dividend stocks so he can develop the perfect portfolio of Dividend stocks for the future. I didn’t realize that Evan and I were pursuing similar paths until his last few blog entries! After this last market crash, I’ve lost most of my taste for those high beta stocks that I use to passionately follow (well all except maybe BIDU)…
- Financial Samurai‘s post “Samurai’s Alexa Ranking Challenge Update: Progress Through Adversity” – While this is an update post, what’s great about it is the evolution of a great idea! Sam (Keiju) is going beyond the initial goal and unselfishly trying to promote all the members of this great group! Click the above link to discover some of Sam’s newest spins around the entire challenge! I’m glad to see the Yakezie Buttons are out there too. I feel that I should beat my first challenge before I put it on my site though. Kind of like Wayne and Garth’s “I’m not worthy” chant… I’m hoping by next month end, I, at least, get down to the 200,000 range… maybe 299,000 (maybe I’m being too optimistic though!)… And hopefully in April go for hitting below $200,000… We’ll see (call me a dreamer)…
My Favorite Post from Money Reasons This Week:
- My favorite post from my weekly blogging posts is hands down “I Am Debt Free, My Mortgage Countdown #1 – Equilibrium“! This is a once in a lifetime experience for me (I hope), and surprisingly (at least in my case) a good move. The Financial pundits were saying how sub par this idea was and that I should be putting the money in the stock market, but they aren’t saying that now! Of course, I’m fortunate enough not to live in an area where house prices dropped like stones either! That said, I don’t know if I’d do the same today!!! Interest rates are pretty low right now!!!
Status on other thing’s I’m involved in:
- I’m going to learn to program in php and mysql. I usually work with Microsoft products, but I’ve decided to branch out! I made some good progress considering all that is going on around me at the moment! PHP is pretty interesting!
- My daughter started indoor soccer; she got floored by an 8 year old that weights twice as much as her. Stupid soccer groups! I don’t know why 6 year old girls are in the same division as 8 year old boys anyway…
Goal #1: 2010 Resolution #1, Losing Weight While Saving Money – I’ve shelved this until next Month.
Conclusion: Another crazy busy week, I got to play Mr. Mom (this is an 80′s movie that is pretty good actually) for most of this week, and overall I enjoyed it! Next week will be more stable, no more last night blog postings (yay)!
-D
)!!!
). 
RSS
Twitter
