And it isn't even late yet!

April Redux:
No-Spend Days: 16/27 (and 5 more "controlled spending" days)
No Eating Out Days: 24/26
Extra Income: $107.22 ($27.31 from InboxDollars, $25 gc from MyPoints, $50 cash back bonus from cc, $4.91 interest)
Money Into Savings: $1183.95
Retirement Savings: $612.40
Workout Days: 22!!
Books Finished: OMG, none – but I am reading a really long boring one, it just won’t end
Times Flossed: 5
Letters/Cards/Contacts: 3

Progress on 2009 Goals:

• continued to reduce my Bank of Mom debt (turtling for now to rebuild savings/EF)
  have kept my amazon.com card paid off each month – AND I got another $50 cash back reward from them this month!
• kept my credit union savings/checking account balances above $750 in each account to take advantage of the special rate – monthly goal MET!
• met all of the monthly requirements for my Checking ++ account – monthly goal MET!
• have not started working on my 2009 Roth yet, because I’ve got a few vacations/birthdays coming up immediately and I want to make sure to save for those first before they happen!
• continued contributing to my SIMPLE IRA (w/matching)
• kept my "Little EF" above $1,000
• continued contributing to my "Big EF"
• contributed more to my "vacation fund" so that I will not have to use a credit card to go on the trip! (Well, you know what I mean, I’ll still use the card for the awesome reward points, but be able to pay it off the same month.) I also figured out a way to account for ‘spent savings’ in my spreadsheets. It took awhile, but it’s all in there now.
• put a little money in the Wedding Fund – yay!
• continued to post on the No-/Controlled-Spend thread, but missed my no spending days AND no eating out days goals this month.. probably set them a little high, knowing there would be a weekend trip in there. Shucks!
• I worked out 22 times this month!! Goal very emphatically met!! I also had 20 days of eating healthy. I am down about 8 pounds from when I got my Wii Fit, and most of that happened in April.
• staying positive at work was a lot easier this month, because it got insanely busy all of a sudden! I don’t think it was the marketing I was doing, I think it’s just luck. But hey, I’ll take it. Woo hoo!
• I cleaned out the storage space! Airbear and I got that bookshelf bed, and so we were able to store a lot of stuff under there. The remaining junk is in the living room at the moment (ha ha, good thing I don’t have a "house cleaning goal" on my list), but today I got to pay only five dollars for one pro-rated day of storage (since I worked 12 hours the last few days of April, I couldn’t quite get it cleaned out until today, May 1). That’s instead of the $85 a month I was paying. And I was thinking this would be something I’d have to spend a bunch of Fridays over the summer doing… but it’s already done! Super excited that I will be getting to hang onto that $85 each month now. Goal met!
• caught up on all my surveys and am trying to check into that email account frequently so I can do them before they expire.
• did pretty well being patient this month!
• sent my Grandma an Easter card, which she gushed about, so that’s good!
• and, last but certainly not least, I did very well with some presents this month! Presents are always a weakness for me—it’s a big challenge to reign in my spending. But I set a budget for Airbear’s birthday gifts and stuck to it and set a budget for a birthday gift for my Mom and stuck to that too! I did blow it a little on Airbear’s birthday dinner, but that was bad planning on my part. Mom & Airbear are the hardest to not buy a jillion presents for, and their birthdays are right next to each other! But I think I did pretty well. Happy Birthday, you two!

March Redux... finally!

So I took a couple categories off the posting format, because they kind of overlapped and weren't that useful. But here's the good stuff:

March:
No-Spend Days: 20/20
No Eating Out Days: 25/25
Extra Income: $222.09 ($30.21 rebate from Walgreens, $60 gc for rx transfer, $100 cash back bonus from cc, $31.88 interest)
Money Into Savings: $1605.87
Retirement Savings: $1100
Workout Days: 8
Books Finished: 3
Times Flossed: 6 (still going up!)
Letters/Cards/Contacts: 4
Progress on 2009 Goals:

• continuing to reduce my Bank of Mom debt (turtling for now to rebuild savings/EF)
• have kept my amazon.com card paid off each month – AND I got a $100 cash back reward from them this month for points I’ve accrued so far…without ever having paid them a cent in interest. TAKE THAT, CREDIT CARD COMPANIES!!
• kept my credit union savings/checking account balances above $750 in each account to take advantage of the special rate – monthly goal MET!
• met all of the monthly requirements for my Checking ++ account (although the reward rate was lower this month, 4.52% APY, boo! Still better than I can find most anywhere else, though! – monthly goal MET!
• The 2008 Roth: I wanted to max this out as much as possible by April 15 (with the ultimate max being $5k), but that upper limit was starting to make me consider doing crazy things, like emptying my EF in order to reach a goal just because I wanted to reach it, and not because it would be the financially wisest thing to do. So I decided I would try for $2500 – half of the maximum allowed, and really a pretty awesome amount to have contributed since January of this year. And I did it! Goal met! (and that makes me feel really positive about my ability to get to a point where I can max out 2009’s, too!). Very excited about this one.
• continued contributing to my SIMPLE IRA (w/matching)
• kept my "Little EF" above $1,000
• continued contributing to my "Big EF"
• decided to go to Vegas with Mom & Dad, Airbear, and some other friends, so I have been putting more into my "vacation fund" so that I will not have to use a credit card to go on the trip! (Well, you know what I mean, I’ll still use the card for the awesome reward points, but be able to pay it off the same month.)
• Renamed "Special Occasion Fund" as "Wedding Fund," because now it’s official… we got engaged on March 20! Now I’ll just have to start working on filling it… but the vacations are coming up in a month so I have to tend to those first.
• continuing to post on the No-/Controlled-Spend thread, and got 20/20 no spending days and 25/25 no eating out days – goal (just barely) met!
• I worked out 8 times this month, but they were very spaced out. I’m going to use the upcoming Vegas trip (swimsuit needed!) to motivate myself to do a lot better in April, including eating healthy. [FWIW I’m off to a great start on this already – 3/5 days worked out so far and 5/5 eating healthy!]
• Worked hard to stay positive at work this month, and it was a challenge, I’ll say! Some distressing issues, and it’s wearing me down. I’m trying to do a lot of marketing, so I really do hope I will see some results from that in April. Crossing my fingers!
• Checked my credit report, had a couple of address inaccuracies (really just typos, but you can’t be too careful) fixed, and got my credit score for the first time in my life. It was above 800!! I was so floored, and proud! I am certain it would not have been nearly that good a year ago, and it’s getting even better (since I had just applied for the amazon card not too long ago and had a couple cards closed at my request, which dings the score a bit). Exciting! Goal met!
• Took a few more surveys.. definitely kept current on the MyPoints ones.. but I’ve been slacking off a bit with the others and missed several because I let them sit too long in my junk email inbox. Of course I might not have qualified for them anyway but I still should be trying. Every little bit helps!
• Was better about being patient this month. I think :)
• Sent my Grandma a St. Patrick’s Day card, and called her (and a dear but recently out-of-touch friend) to celebrate the engagement! Also emailed a friend in Japan I haven’t talked to in awhile. The "keeping in contact" goal was one I’ve had on my list of New Year’s Resolutions several times now and I definitely think I’m doing better at it this year. Accountability helps!

This is the best thing ever

Okay, I know it's Easter, but get ready for one of the deadly sins - envy - because you are really gonna feel it. Look what got delivered on Friday:

Yes, it's really tall. Look just how tall:

We're going to be ordering one of those rolling library ladders for the side of it to help short little me get into it. The kitties don't have a problem with it, although now they can't divebomb us as hard from the kitty tree - unintended bonus.

But wait, there's more! (No, we didn't order 2 for the price of 1). In addition to getting eight more new glorious bookshelves, check out this part:

There's storage! There's even a bookshelf inside the bookshelf bed!! There just are not words to express how awesome this bed is. We get more bookshelves (and really, in a condo this small, there were really not a lot of options for this, and I'm not going to stop getting books), we get bonus storage (in fact we'll get to cancel the storage space after this month if we can figure out what to do with just a few last items!), and we have the most awesome, most unique room ever. It was custom built according to Airbear's "schematic" below [1]:

[1] Gotta love schematics!

You never see it coming...

I don't know if you're a fan of (the new, but now finished) Battlestar Galactica series, but the main points of the show that are important for understanding this particular story are that 1) the show is awesome, and so a ton of our friends would get together on Friday nights and watch it, and 2) there are robots called Cylons. Some of the Cylons evolved and look like humans now (sneaky!), but the old-style ones have this red light that goes back and forth where the eyes would be on their helmet, bwaaah, bwaaah, bwaah, etc. Kind of like KITT, in Knight Rider, remember? Here's a video.

So we have this friend, UnBob. UnBob got engaged last summer, and as seems to be prevalent amongst married or soon-to-be-married folks, started bugging all his friends in relationships to get married too. Which consisted of just me and Airbear. When properly motivated (e.g., drunk), unBob kept bringing up this idea. A few weeks before this past season of Battlestar resumed--a big deal, since it was going to be the last season of the series--he said, "Oh, he's totally going to propose to you at the Battlestar premier!" and, a few drinks later, "He's going to propose with a Cylon helmet instead of a ring!" Ha. That UnBob sure is funny.

A couple weeks later, premier approaching, UnBob was once again 'in his cups' as they say[1], and absolutely positive (and irritatingly insistent) that his scenario was going to play out. Telling him to stuff it didn't work this time, and he was so convinced that he was willing to bet drinks on it. 1 drink for episode 1, 2 drinks if it did/didn't happen by the second episode, and so on. Note that he didn't have any kind of inside information from Airbear (far from it, in fact Airbear wasn't allowed to know about the bet), he was just drunk and foolhardy. I took the bet, 99% sure that I was going to win anyway (and thus sure of a bunch of free drinks), and 1% concluding that even if the 'worst' were to happen, bet-wise, I'd have to buy UnBob 10 drinks on the last day of the season if Airbear proposed. And shoot, if something like THAT happened, I'd probably be buying everyone ten drinks!

Fast forward to five weeks into the series. As usually happens when drunks make bets, UnBob was losing. In fact, he was losing so badly that he was owing me drinks faster than I (and my friend!!) could drink them. He started getting that weepy puppy dog look they put on the Hallmark "sympathy" cards every Friday night when we'd hit the pub after watching the show. And while I knew Eagle would have said to stick it to him, make him pay, teach him a lesson for making stupid bets - it's the Leo way, after all - I am a nice kid at heart and I was starting to feel guilty about bankrupting poor UnBob. After all, I know Airbear a lot better than he does so I really had inside information, in a way. And I had already gotten five weeks' worth of free drinking on Fridays. But ya know if you gotta listen to someone remind you about the fact that you didn't get proposed to, I guess there should be some kind of payment for that.

I enjoyed the rest of the run of the show. Some fans had some complaints with it - I'm sure that's always the case - and of course the guys wanted to see more spaceship battles and less talking, but I thought it kicked ass. (I'm hoping that when the series comes out on DVD it's in a metal box shaped like a robot head with a red light eye that flashes back and forth.) I also have to say that no series finale is ever going to come close to that one. One big spaceship flew into another big spaceship, lots of flying and shooting, some nukes, they finally killed off the president (OMG I was waiting for that the whole show - hated her!), and they found a nice planet to live on. But the best part happened after the credits.

I had actually gotten up and gone to the kitchen to get this bag of little ceramic ramekins and random ingredients I'd left at Eagle's the time before, and most of our buddies were getting up to go to the pub. But then Airbear said loudly, "I have an announcement to make!" and everybody stopped breathing and didn't move, because Airbear never talks, and especially not loudly. I turned around and stepped back into the living room to see WTF could possibly be going on and he got down on one knee and opened up a black velvet ring box.

And I saw this.

I have to be honest: my immediate thought was that he was just frackin' with UnBob about the bet (because we'd canceled it already and now he wouldn't win).

My second thought was oh, shit, shit, talk Nitza talk you're supposed to say something!

I dropped everything on the floor and made quite a racket (between the keys and the ceramic dishware, which I'm surprised didn't shatter all over the floor) and just sort of dove at Airbear to hug him/bury my face in his shoulder and said of course. Everybody was yelling and clapping and I was crying, obviously, and shaking and just a big huge mess.

And no, UnBob didn't know about it either - it was a total surprise. I did buy that kid a drink, though, and he enthusiastically takes credit for instigating the whole thing. He also says he's going to be a Cylon usher in our wedding. We'll see about that part ;)

[1] He really doesn't drink all the time - just when I see him.

February Redux

Month Two of 2009 down, and a ton of progress made - what an exciting month!

February:
No-Spend Days: 18/21
No Eating Out Days: 25/24
Extra Income: $45 ($35 gc for rx transfer, $10 gc from surveys)
Money Into Savings: $1,000.59
Debt Paid Off: $687.04
Retirement Savings: $1,273.45 (really!)
Other Money Spent: $376.74
Workout Days: 9
Books Finished: 3
Times Flossed: 4 (that’s a 100% increase, ha ha!)
Letters/Cards/Contacts: 3

Progress on 2009 Goals:

• continuing to reduce my Bank of Mom debt (turtling for now to rebuild savings/EF)
• have kept my amazon.com card paid off each month - monthly goal met!
• kept my credit union savings/checking account balances above $750 in each account to take advantage of the special rate - goal MET!
• new goal added: saved $100 and started another new account at Sterling Savings Bank (which will get me a $101 bonus in 3 months) – goal MET!
• met all of the monthly requirements for my Checking ++ account to earn 5.00% APY – monthly goal MET!
• Saved $1,000 and started a Roth at Vanguard. Also rolled my current Roth money out of my broker account. (This was a big goal met for me, although on my actual goal sheet it says to max out as much of it as I can by April 15.. so I guess we have to wait on that part still!)
• continued contributing to my SIMPLE IRA (w/matching)
• kept my "Little EF" above $1,000
• continued contributing to my "Big EF" (although I probably will be taking some out of it to keep working on that Roth goal)
• continuing to post on the No-/Controlled-Spend thread, and got 18/21 no spending days (aw, goal missed) and 25/24 no eating out days – goal met!
• Despite my later work schedule, I actually worked out more times this month (9!) although there were big breaks in between those days. It’d be good to be more evenly spaced out with the workouts.. we’ll see.
• Worked hard to stay positive at work this month, although it was harder than last month. Did not feel like I had a lot of energy at work. Will try better at this in March.
• Updated my resume – goal met!
• Got a performance evaluation – it was glowing! Hard to identify areas for improvement, actually. Will need to think about that part some more.
• Continued to learn about investing – I feel really solid about what I need to know for now, so I’m going to consider this goal met! (When I get enough put away to branch out into emerging markets and so on, I’ll put the goal back on the list.)
• Saved my entire tax return and put it into my new Roth! Goal met!
• Took more surveys.. and got to cash out two of them, actually! Got a $10 gift card to amazon, and will be getting a check in the mail for the other program. I’ll count that one when it actually arrives. Monthly goal met!
• Was not so patient this month. Will try again in March!
• Sent my Grandma and my Dad Valentine’s cards, and sent another card to Grandma. I’d like to add in a phone call to her for March.

Man, what a February. And to think that last February I was $20k in credit card debt. Look at me now :)

Zzzzz.....

Just a quick p0ast tonight, as I am very sleepy. I've been working some long days, trying to get enrollments up school. I seem to be getting more parents wanting me to "entertain" (?) them, show them lots of snazzy science experiments and dazzle their kids with how FUN learning is. While we do make an effort to make sure that it is, indeed, fun wherever possible--it's educational therapy. These are kids who need to make up credits, who need re-teaching or to work at their own pace. The problem is they have been in "fun" classes where they do a lot of art projects and "discover" concepts (or don't) and, most importantly, work in groups, because that is the solution to all educational problems today, in case you didn't know. Anyway it's made me feel really supremely irritated but I smile and I dazzle them (as best I can) because I want to try and stay optimistic and high-energy at work and get those enrollments. Some days are easier than others. Days that end at 8:30 pm are amongst said "others." But at least I persevered and ate dinner at home... and it's one day closer to payday!

Control

Today I called up Vanguard and opened a brand spankin' new Roth account. I'm going to roll over the funds in the Roth at my current broker, because their fees are way too high. I did a bunch of research into different mutual fund companies, I read a few investment books, and I looked up all the data on different mutual funds that would match my desired asset allocation. Yes. I made a "desired asset allocation." Of my own. With my actual brain.

I called four different mutual fund companies numerous times to get all of my question answered, and I kept calling back until I really understood what was offered. I chose a company whose customer service had been demonstrated as excellent (repeatedly), which also happened to be the company with the lowest expenses, an easy-to-use online interface, AND longer (wider? bigger?) operating hours in case I actually need to talk to a human being. I even laid out which of their funds I will be investing in (eventually, when I have enough to meet the minimum in multiple funds), but for now I can start with a lower-minimum, pretty conservatively allocated but strongly performing fund.

I went online and made a call, and now the account is open, the check is in the mail, and the rollover is in progress.

When I hung up the phone, I felt a tremendous surge of power--and no, before you ask, I had not spilled my pepsi on the power strip or anything of the sort. I just felt that I am taking financial control of my life. I am smart enough to do this, I am dedicated enough to do this, and I can do it on my own: I don't need a broker to do things for me (and sock me with a bunch of fees on the sly), and I don't need to be scared of the big bad investing world. I am a powerful and intelligent woman, and while I might not have very much money, I am going to do amazing things with that little bit, and make it grow bigger and bigger.

Just you watch!