October 27, 2008
It aggravated me to no end to realize that after spending all that time organizing, scanning and shredding, I was still receiving paper statements. Well, duh. I’d not followed up by cancelling paper statements because, deep down, I don’t trust those darned companies not to try to slip one past me!
*By “those” companies, I mean all of them. I don’t trust companies. But that’s just because I’m a good steward of my money and they’re good takers of my money. Biiiig difference.
In any case, there’s no point in prolonging my pain when I know off the top of my head that, at least for my Chase credit cards, I can always download the PDF of the statement for my records.
As of tonight, I’m signing up for paperless only for my:
- Chase credit card accounts – 4 total. I only use one card regularly, so I’ll check those statements as they’re produced and I’m not worried about the other three. Any charges on the other three will come up as transactions on Yodlee so I can check out the anomalies.
- Citi credit cards – 5 consumer cards total. They’ll send me email notifications for each statement and I can download the six most recent months’ worth of PDFs as well.
- American Express – couldn’t switch because they were having maintenance issues. Bummer, try again later.
By the time I’m through scanning all the CC statements, a billing cycle will likely have passed and the statements will stop. Yippee!
Next up: cell phone bills (2), and banking statements (10). It occurs to me that a great way to simplify some of this would be to consolidate more accounts and, y’know, actually simplify my banking and accounting systems. Mmhmm…. just a thought.
September 29, 2008
I wouldn’t be opposed, myself.
Saturday was packed, and yet felt like I didn’t get much done. Friend and I finally tackled the nagging car problems and mid-way through diagnosing the window issue, the car battery died. Excellent timing. $80 later for a new battery, and $8 for Mcdonald’s as payment for the labor, my car was ready to run again, and we’re ready to research and order new parts. Our best guess, since we’re clearly not mechanics, is that since it’s not an electrical problem, and the fuses are ok, it might be the window regulator.
We’ll use his mechanic as a resource to price the part and the estimated (recommended) labor. That’ll be compared to the warrantied used-car-parts place that Friend uses as well. We’ll decide what to do (go with a new part, and personal labor, a used part and personal labor, or either part and mechanic labor) when we’ve got all the angles covered. Bonus: It’s amazingly refreshing to know that the cost is covered by my auto maintenance fund.
Working on the car took four hours. I was pretty beat, so instead of getting right to work when I got home, I talked in the phone for an hour. Lunch with the friends at a new sushi restaurant ate up another 2 hours, and food coma quickly took care of the next hour and half. I’ve been making my way through Neil Gaiman’s Fragile Things (a birthday gift) and fell asleep somewhere between a short story or poem.
The pressing need to do laundry, work, cleaning, organizing, more online research and submissions of things, blog posts, etc. fueled a bit of guilt, but honestly, I needed the time to become human again after a long week of work.
Becoming more human included having a spot of dinner with friends, and watching Run, FatBoy Run that night. I like Simon Pegg, and the movie was amusing, but it didn’t have the unpredictable plot or twisted humor I’ve come to expect from him. It was a bit disappointingly predictable, really. And I know, it wasn’t his movie, so I can’t really blame him. Happily, I continued to honor my strike against Blockbuster and their ridiculous prices by renting from the local independent video store. They charge $1.79 per movie, per day. Since I rarely watch movies, and don’t have any need to keep the DVD for more than the day it takes to watch, I love this kind of rental. Actually, it’s an ingrained preference since I grew up renting from an independent store for a dollar a day, per video. None of this chain, $5/five days for a single movie nonsense for me! $4, two movies, one go. Good stuff!
Sunday was even more jam-packed: started working as soon as I got up, did laundry, met up with a friend to lend a sympathetic ear, took loads of recycling to the center, and tried to compose some general letters. Also, watched the second movie, dodged a possible birthday party out in the city because I couldn’t stomach the idea of another sushi meal so soon after the last, and and and …!
I think, perhaps, the better idea than to try to squeeze more hours or days out of the weekend, better time and task management is in order. It’s not that I find any of the above tasks distasteful, so it’s more a matter of proper distribution throughout the week so that I’m not cramming a thousand and one tasks into each day, and wonder why I’m so tired on Monday. Something like SavingDiva’s cleaning schedule. While saving up all the tasks makes it seem like everything gets done in a single go, the truth is, they’re all just waiting until the end of the week, and if we’re lucky, most of it’s completed.
Taking into consideration I don’t get home before 8 pm most nights, there are still ways to incorporate micro-versions of some of these chores into each night.
1. Laundry always takes about an hour and a half per load, so that’ll remain a weekend chore.
2. Letting mail pile up, though, has recently become a bad habit. I’ll open and read the mail, but won’t file it for a couple of days. That needs to stop. I’ll discard (appropriately) as I go, daily.
3. Cleaning: I will pick up after myself as I go, each day. Jackets get hung up, laundry goes into the basket or hung up again (jeans) each night. No more letting it pile up so I can “decide” later.
4. Letters/correspondence/career related writing: Pick one item, just one, and focus on it every other day.
September 5, 2008
It’s not anything so nuts as actually running the numbers, precisely. Sort of. I just decided that in the spirit of getting ready to pick up and fly where the winds may take me (am I mixing my metaphors?), it’s more than time for me to get more of my financial paperwork online.
Also, my receipts were all hanging out in a single envelope, and that’s unsightly. While I’m not ready to go all out like FB’s scan-a-thon, oh but I would LOVE to, I did want to get started.
So, I grabbed all my receipts, and sat up organizing them into several categories for the Schedule C portion of my income: Gasoline, Business Clothing, Business Gifts, Cell Phone, Dry Cleaning, Travel and Office Supplies. Then, I opened up a new spreadsheet and a kajillion new sheets on Google Docs. The dates, amounts and any applicable notes for each receipt were recorded in chronological order. It only took about two hours to sort, create, and enter the data.
Now that all of the amounts are in a single place, I can easily PDF the whole thing, and take them to my friend’s house to hang out with his dad and learn how to really do taxes next year.
My next step? Getting a good deal on a scanner and scanning all of the tons of files that I’ve got in my room. Offhand, I have files for:
~ auto insurance, maintenance and registration records for three cars
~ Rollover IRA statements
~ FSA records
~ old BT credit card records
~ airline and hotel rewards membership numbers and information
~ tons of credit card statements from the past few years
~ household bills/statements
~ cell phone records
~ payroll records
~ past three or four years’ worth of tax returns
I could recycle some serious paper!
*Now I’m oogling multipage scanners. I don’t need that…. I need to save money more than I do time. Then again, hmmm……*
August 18, 2008
A whole pile of old clothing that I was sure I’d Goodwilled last year turned up in an older suitcase that I haven’t used in years. It’s a backpack zipped onto another backpack style, so I use that one for international or very long lengthy trips. (*sigh* Memories of my trip to Italy so many many moons ago.) As it turns out, that purple dress I was lamenting the sacrifice of was part of that pile, and I sorted through the clothes juuuust to be sure that there was nothing in there that I regretted purging. There was just one pair of cargo pants I’d outgrown, but strangely fit again, that I need to take needle and thread to, and a very light blue and white dress I might just want as a beach cover-up.
The rest of the clothing definitely needs to go to another home. Good grief, I found clothes in there from junior high and early high school years and I can’t believe I wore that stuff! Nothing was completely-and-totally hideous, but they were all slightly ill-fitting. I was too small for regular sizes and hadn’t discovered the tailor; that didn’t happen until after college. Yes, I am a total late bloomer. Heck, I’m still not sure I’ve bloomed completely! Also, it seems there’s physical evidence that I used to believe in buying things that were a bargain because they were on sale. Thank heavens I’ve outgrown that phase. I just wish that my mother had taught me not to do that in the first place, y’know?
It’s a huge relief to understand now that it’s worth paying a bit more for something higher quality, that’s very close to my size, and paying a bit more on top of that to have it fitted to my body. Let’s face it, I’m never going to be a standard size, very few of us actually are, so it just makes sense not to buy a whole lot of junk in search of a few good pieces.
Lessons learned.
August 14, 2008
Living under a rock, as usual, I’ve only just discovered Google Docs. I’m now using it regularly to update my resumes and track my PayPerPost posts and the accounts the money goes into. It’s awesome! I kept thinking that I needed to keep tabs on how much money went into each account since I’m rotating in increments of 100/100/50, but hadn’t bothered to set up a system beforehand. Turns out keeping track in your head? Not really a great method of accounting. You’d think I’d know that by now, right?
Besides a modicum of laziness, my pessimism decided PPP would take as long as Google Adsense to build up any significant amount (2 years and counting!!) but I’ve actually broken the $100 mark with PPP so far, and hope to continue full steam ahead.
So, knowing that the amounts in my accounts (especially the Travel Fund) would constantly fluctuate, I started an Excel sheet listing the date of the post, the post number, the approval date, the payout date, the payout amount, the running balance, the account that the payout would go to, the balance in the specific account, and a tranfer date so I’d know when the funds went from PayPal to my bank account. Whew!
So far, the only thing that bothers me is that they only give the post number in the actual PayPal transaction. It doesn’t appear in the post history, the email notification of approval or payout, or anywhere else. That’s a little aggravating, so I added a post title column just so to clear up identification issues.
May 21, 2008
My first payouts were received this weekend, and I’ve transferred $33.50 to my house fund. How exciting! I think I’m going to alternate payments between the travel and house fund, in increments of $100. It was only appropriate that the first payout go towards the house since the travel fund has been established and funded.
I just have to keep creating little bits of income to ‘flake into those accounts. I love the feeling of progress!
April 25, 2008
The catchall drawer. Does anyone remember it? The one drawer in the house that seems to suck everything into its depths, and some things never emerge again? All the drawers in my desk are starting to go that way, but the middle drawer is the worst.
Digging out the contents revealed: about nine hundred fifty pens; twenty highlighters; twenty pencils, wooden or mechanical; fifteen Sharpies of various shapes, sizes and colors; solid and liquid white-out; staples; tiny little folding papers to make those puff-up stars; two jade bracelets; a Masterlock the combination of which has been lost for all time; a tiny magnifying glass in a leather case; my Discover-to-go card that expired in June 2006; a half dozen sheets of really cute but juvenile stickers; 7 AAA batteries, two of which were dead, two which are questionable; two old pagers; old house keys to my best friend’s house, but for the door that her brother broke about 7 years ago; and a one legged compass. That’s just for an example!
Whew! I can’t believe that all of that could fit into one drawer, two inches deep! Granted, it’s about two feet across, but my goodness! That’s way too much stuff. I checked every pen, pencil and highlighter and threw away about a hundred, divvied the pens up into “good-keep” and “good-give away” piles, and now have a sack of perfectly good pens that I don’t want. I’ll take them to work, there’s always a need for pens there.
I can’t bring myself to throw away that lock. I know I’ll never remember or figure out the combination, but it’s such a good solid lock, I just can’t do it.
Likewise with the pagers. I know no one uses pagers anymore except the doctors I work with, but I’m pretty sure not a one of them will want my teeny tiny light blue pager. It’s really cute, it fits in the palm of my hand! It’s only 1.5″ x 2″, and still has the original silver chain/clip, and matching light blue belt clip. The only reason I stopped using it was because I finally got a cell phone back in 2001. Huh, I wonder if that’s why I had that box of AAA batteries? It does use a AAA battery …..