April 17, 2007
Free Ben & Jerry’s!
How did I forget to post this earlier?? It’s Free Cone Day at Ben & Jerry’s! From 12pm-8pm.
April 16, 2007
Slippery Slope Confession
Rats. Rats rats rats. It’s just halfway through April and I’ve already broken my resolution. Twice. First, the nachos on Friday. Now, the burger. What next?? I was doing SO well, too!
Other than working, Saturday was spent mending a sock (hole in the toe), a tank top (the straps frayed and snapped off in the back. What the heck??), re-buttoning two pairs of pants (trying to avoid the tailor).
Then on Sunday, I cooked coconut rice at home, went to library and gathered an armload of books, and got the crew (well, a fraction of them, anyway) together last night for a movie night. I’d successfully sidestepped all hazards of spending money on going out: We went to a friend’s house, picked out a movie he already owned instead of going out to the movies (never mind that this also caters to my homebody-ness), snacked on food he already had. Ok, so that’s sort of like mooching, but not entirely.
But then they got hungry. And that there was my downfall. We went to Mimi’s and I remembered how I’d been craving a cheeseburger all week. And *bam* I spent ten bucks on a cheeseburger and baked potato. Oh, the shame! It was an awfully good cheeseburger though … even if I did forget my leftover half-potato at my friend’s house afterward. So much for making a second meal out of it.
April 13, 2007
I say this every year: Next year, I’ll do my own taxes!
Not five minutes ago, I scored a major triumph: the accountant completely skipped over my painstakingly compiled graph with all the pertinent details of my Federal Excise Tax Credit (darned if I was going to take their paltry $40 credit).
After walking him through the Form number and all, he recalculated with the better-than-his standard credit and found that not only do I not owe money, I’ll get a baby refund of $75. Hey, I’m not complaining, I’m just happy I don’t have to waste a check or a stamp!
Turns out, though, there was a nuance to the somewhat tangled family finances that I never uncovered in my combing of the IRS publications: MaDucky earned too much for me to claim her as a dependent as Head of Household. Because she’s married to him, and we obviously can’t both claim him as our dependent, I thought this would sink my carefully planned tax year.
It turns out that while she can file a joint return as a married individual, I can still claim his exemption on my taxes. She gets a partial benefit on her standard deduction (looks like she’s filing for 1.5 deductions) and I get the rest of it in the form of another exemption $3,300, thereby splitting the benefits of having PaDucky around. And he’ll still do her laundry. 😉
My return and her 9 W-2 forms, from working for various clients, will run us a total of $120. Oh and I get a ridiculous state refund: $1290. After the fees, I’ll be up a $1245 windfall that I didn’t expect. That means I can take about $200 off the top to pay some bills, if necessary, and throw that whole extra thousand into my house fund (or my rather depleted e-fund). Strangely, that doesn’t sound as fun as it should.
And yes, I did remember to give him my bank account number to direct deposit my refund. I’ll be watching for my fat deposit on April 27th. Oh, the joys of technology! *dancing the jig o’ triumph*
So was it worth it? Worth a whole $120? Well, I didn’t have to labor over every single number. Of course, neither did he, since he used a program – and admitted that’s why he missed my nifty non-standard credit. But was it worth not spending my hours over, and getting to just double check someone else’s work? The lazy part of me says yesyesyes! Eh, in principle I still think I should do it myself. But I’m being really lazy. It’s probably because the cost is not great enough, yet, for me to say “Oh no you din’t!” just yet.
That’s also probably because he normally discounts for us too. Last year that $120 would have been reduced to, say, $100 or $75. Next time, PaDucky can ask him for the total because I have a sneaking suspicion that he’s scared of Pa and will discount on account of not wanting to say the “real amount.” What? Is that wrong or something?
*OH!* Duh, I know where that $1000 should go! In my 2007 Roth!! Nothing’s been deposited there yet, and it’s too late to fully fund the 2006 account. Yes?
Wine glasses and corkscrews, oh my …
I’m officially the office birthday monkey. Last month, I made the resolution that I would never again be caught unawares and find myself searching for the funniestcardever on the night before an officemate’s birthday. Now I’ve two weeks to make reservations and purchase, wrap and otherwise conceal gifts for Little Boss’s birthday at the end of this month.
I’ve been searching the inter-webs for Riedel wine glasses of a particular shape and a really nice corkscrew with a leather case and possibly a wood box of some sort for storage. No luck on the corkscrew thus far. It’s a little weird trying to bargain hunt for “office supplies” (any number of weird things fall into that category) because Big Boss has such a specific idea of what he wants.
Normally, I would just use the office credit card to order online, except Little Boss gets the statement and I don’t want him to find out what we’re getting him before his birthday. But it seems just a little tacky to charge it on my card and then say: here, can I get a reimbursement? He’ll know what we spent anyway, but still. Just sayin’ it feels a little tacky.
April 8, 2007
HAPPY EASTER! (heehee)
April 6, 2007
Duh, it’s FRIDAY!
All week I’ve been thinking: I can have Good Friday off if I want. Do I? I have lots of work, should I really take another day off after taking Monday off? Finally I decided to go for it since I’ve totally put in my time working weekends and such for the past … entire time I’ve worked at this job.
Apparently it never sank in. I was at the ATM this morning, frustrated that I didn’t have a pen even though I specifically thought “put a pen in your pocket for the ATM”, and wondering why on earth the bank’s doors were still open at 2pm on a Saturday.
………
*lightbulb* It’s not just Friday for me!! Happy Good Friday, everyone!
I got lots of financial stuff done today:
Recycled a few bagsfuls of cans – $6.15 (Oh, the irony: walking around the recycling station, people had littered … their bottles and cans. Come on!!)
Deposited my reimbursement from work for my train pass and various transportation, and birthday gifts purchased for the office: $128.13
Deposited a payment from BroDucky for some money I’d loaned him. (*cringe* I know, I swore that I’d never do that again and … I regretted it as soon as my resolve slipped. But, never again!! It is way too stressful dealing with finances, much less allow family and trust issues get into the mix. That’s just ugly.)
Filled in most of the remaining blanks in the past three months’ worth of bills on my Pearbudget file.
(I like the fact that I can make it web-based via Google Docs, but does anyone else find the navigation of the site really slow?)
Decided that April and May have to be no-spend months to make up for the free-flowing money in January and March. That leaves me all of June to save up for whatever budget I get for Comic-Con at the end of July!
Still left to do:
Trawl CashDuck to make some extra monies so the April and May’s budgets aren’t so squeezed that they start looking like those Pillsbury Dough tubes!
I have to get new windshield wipers for the DuckyCar. She’s needed wipers for a while now, but I just never got ’round to that.
Put together PaDucky’s resume. Keep your fingers crossed!!
April 5, 2007
PearBudget Trial
Tchah! On the plus side, I’ve been hunting for a good budgeting tool that wasn’t MSN Money or Quicken because I don’t want to deal with importing information from a million places. PearBudget does that. And PearBudget does all sorts of little calculatory things that I like, like giving me immediate spent/budgeted totals for my categories. It also has this cool analysis page with monthly totals columns.
On the minus side, I’m now obsessively inputting charges from the past few months. I’m having extreme difficulty tearing myself away. And though I’m usually very careful about how and when I spend money, I can already see a pattern of spending way more loosely than I suspected in the past few months. Yes, finding spending patterns is the point of tracking all the expenses and the only way to plug holes, but it’s still sort of a horrific feeling. Thank goodness for credit cards, though. If I’d spent that money in cash or using checks, this would be ten times more frustrating.
What I’d love to see:
(For my neurotic side) An ability to enter every single transaction separately, even on the same day, with a description column so I know exactly where every penny went.
(For my other neurotic side) A section dedicated to savings: regular savings, retirement savings, etc.
To compensate, I may take the savings category out of the Regular Expenses section and create a column under the Variable Expenses section, but that doesn’t feel quite right.
Any suggestions?