My Debt Reduction Blog

Even though it’s been over a month and a half since my last post, I haven’t given up my debt reduction blog. Just, took a little time off. Well, it really was a lot deeper of a reason than that. Life’s been a wee bit rough on our household. I’m hoping to get back in to the swing of things now that the ‘rough stuff’ has leveled out. Besides we’ve had some financial changes over the last month and there are some HUGE ones coming up.

Be back soon with an actual on-topic post.

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I’ve been trying really hard to bring a lunch every day to work. By doing that, I could probably save between $25 – $30 a week. But every day around 11 they start passing around the menu and it’s so tempting to order. I’ve been guilty in the past of even having food here and still ordering something and letting the food I brought go to waste. I’m turning that bad habit around this also.

Over the last week, I moved and made a modification to our emergency fund. First, the magic number everyone throws around it having $1,000 for an emergency fund. Well, I’ve decided to bump it up to $1,500. This decision was made a few weeks ago when I had to use $500 of it. It seemed weird to use $500 and notice that 50% of the emergency fund is gone. I’ve since replenished the fund and brought it up to $1,500.

The other change made was I moved it from our ING savings to our local bank where we have our checking account. It became apparent a few weeks ago when I needed use some of it, that ING wasn’t the best place for it. Had it been a true emergency, I would have been screwed as it took 4 or 5 days to get the money into our checking account.

So to review; I’ve increased our emergency fund to $1,500 and I moved it to a savings account at our local bank fir quicker access.

Yup, you read that correctly. Certainly not what you should be reading on a blog of a family trying to get out of debt, but it is true. My feet have been hurting from my old and worn out work shoes, and I’ve been looking for a long time for a nice ‘inexpensive’ pair of shoes, but haven’t had much luck. Well, mom to the rescue; she insisted that I go to a local ‘old style’ shoe store where they actually fit you and sell high quality shoes. Then she would reimburse me. It’s been a long time, probably since I was a kid, since I went to a full service shoe store. Well, I ended up buying the first pair of shoes I tried on. They fit really well, and weren’t the most expensive shoes they had at $110. The good news was they were having a sale and all shoes were $10 off, so total cost with tax was $105.50.

It felt so good to have a nice, new pair of shoes that I fell victim to the near by starbucks, and wanted one more treat. I got myself a medium white chocolate mocha. I hate paying $4 for a drink, but I love that drink.

So there, I fell a bit off the debt wagon, but really only by $4.

I know we need one, heck, everyone should have one. But why don’t I? Is it because I’m a procrastinator? Is it because I have no idea how to create one? Is it because I still don’t have grips on all our expenses? Or is it that I’m just full of excuses and lazy?

I started this blog to help me keep focused on our goal, but I am still missing the key ingredient to this debt elimination recipe. That must change!

Historically for us, October gives us our lowest need for utility usage. The temperatures are cool enough so we don’t need to run the A/C and warm enough so we don’t need to kick on the furnace. Well this October has certainly been an exception. Today alone we are expected to hit 89 degree’s and we’ve been in the mid to high eighties for the last week and a half. That is way above normal for Southeast Wisconsin. According to the forcast, we can expect Monday to also be in the eighties, then we are expected to get some relief with temps returning to normal. Tuesday should be in the high sixties and the rest of the week only getting to the high fifties. Those will be much welcomed!

Almost makes the site look professional!

At heart I’m a geek, and by trade I’m a systems administrator, so I monitor a lot of security based websites and news feeds. Today I noticed a posting of a security vulnerability in the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin for wordpress. The authors have released an updated version. It’s very easy and recommended to update to the latest version.

How to update:

1 Download version 2.3 of the plugin.
2 Sign in to your WordPress admin control panel.
3 Under Plugins, locate the current FeedSmith plugin, and click “Deactivate.”
4 Copy the plugin file, FeedBurner_FeedSmith_Plugin.php into your default WordPress plugin directory, wp-content/plugins/
5 Reactivate the plugin by logging in to your WordPress administration area, clicking Plugins, then clicking Activate at the end of the “FeedBurner FeedSmith” row

Via: Feedburner Blog

Well, over the last month there really hasn’t been anything major to report with our finances. I did transfer a couple of balances to 0% percent offers. This weekend I plan to go over our September spending to see how we did compared to the last few months.

We do need to start planning for a major disruption to our income starting at the end of the year. My wife will be leaving her current job to start student teaching. She will be able to get a part time job, but income will be nowhere near what she makes now. Then we have to hope and pray she is able to get a teaching job before the start of the school year. That whole ordeal is starting to stress me out. Yet another reason, ‘Being In Debt Sucks’!

We use Progressive to insure both our vehicles and I pay it every six months. My car has only liability but our mini-van has full coverage. What was nice was that our 6 month total was $12 cheaper than our last bill.