Wow. I had a great weekend. I’m in my early 30’s and I used to go clubbing all the time in my younger days in San Francisco and DC. Last weekend marked the end of an era for me with the closing of Nation.

Back in 2000 when I moved from CA back to the east coast, my college friends in Baltimore were telling me that I had to go to Nation down in DC. It was the bomb, great, fantastic, whatever. I was like, no, it couldn’t be as good at 1015 Folsom. And truly, it wasn’t. But eventually Buzz on Friday nights grew on me. Then Alchemy on Thursday nights grew on me too. (Those darn goth kids and their obsessions with Britpop and New Wave ’80’s!) Next thing you know, I’m there on Saturdays for my fill of gay boy eye candy just to reminisce living in the Castro and dance all night to Junior Vasquez. It’s really the only place in DC that brings out the same level of DJ excellence that 1015 does. Paul Oakenfold, Sasha, John Digweed, Carl Cox, the Detroit sound, house, jungle, techno, trance, etc. All other clubs in DC pale in comparison. They’re just pick up joints where the music is only secondary to the disgusting mating dances of junior hill staffers looking to get laid. (Oops, did I say that out loud?)

I’m an early bird when it comes to going out. I know I turn into a pumpkin at 2am and still have to drive home. That means to get the biggest bang for my cover charge , I’d be in the doors before 10pm for the reduced cover (Frugal Tip #1, get in the door early), get a drink special (Frugal Tip #2), and stay till about 1 or 1:30am. Usually the headliner was on for about 30 minutes to an an hour at that point and then time to go home. *yawn* Proudly, I could spend a well-disciplined $25 for the evening since I’m not much of a drinker. I usually down a Coke on the way over to the club just to keep my energy up and save some money.(Frugal Tip #3, start your drinking at home, responsibly!)

For the very last Friday night at Nation, I bought $35 tickets 3 weeks early (Frugal Tip #4, buy tickets in advance). There was no way I was going to miss this. Rumors are tickets were being scalped out front for $200. I laugh at the money I could have made, but for my very last raver hurrah, I don’t think I could have beat this experience. The DJ line up was incredibly fun, with a lot of old favorites like Scott Hardkiss of the Hardkiss Brothers in SF, Scott Henry, a resident DJ to Nation, and the Utah Saints. I am not one to obsess about DJ set times, but this time, it was worth it. We planned for the long haul pacing our Red Bull/Vodka drinks so as not to wear out too early. It takes dedication and discipline not get your drunk on too early while the night is still young.

It was a night to remember. For my $35 cover, I got back all the memories of every night I’d ever been there with friends, the costumes, the DJ’s, wild moments, accidents, goofy pictures, etc. So worth it. I will have no regrets at the astronomical sums spent on Friday night.

I was there from about 10:30p till 6am. I can’t remember the last time I’d been out like that. The laser lights were pretty amazing. I got a thrill just being impressed with how far laser technology has come in the last 6 years. They had 12 set up and one in particular that had blue and reds they were bending into yellow. I would love to know just how much water it takes to cool something like that.

Yeah the E-tards were out in force. One of my friends dances on stilts and was hired to entertain for a bit. That was sort of fun to watch tripping kids get blown over by him when they realized there was a very, very tall man standing next to them.

There was the obligatory post-clubbing meal at the all night diner near my house. Dropping off a friend at the Metro station when it opened up and napping all day till we had to leave for Chicago (the musical) at Wolf Trap for a more sophisticated evening under the stars.

All in all, I spent $90 at the club. Breakfast the next morning was about $7.00. I am unrepentant. At my age, there aren’t going to be many more nights like this again. I just can’t take it. FWIW, I am still sore from dancing and it’s a Tuesday.

CNN/Money reports that more colleges are accepting credit cards for tuition payment.

I don’t find this surprising since credit cards are readily available and financing for college seems out of reach. But given the rising cost of tuition in general and interest rates, this seems like a very, very bad idea as a long term way of financing school. I can understand doing it because your disbursement check hasn’t arrived at the bursar’s office in time for you to register for the classes you need to graduate, but I am certain that some kids are going to get royally screwed with this method of tuition payment.

I alluded to this earlier, but I wanted to say something more about it because during our conversation we talked about money and our finances. I accidentally included MFC in a signature line on an email exchange and he confessed to reading a few entries.

Back when we were dating, I had a lot of student loan and credit card debt. I was grossly underemployed post dot-com bust, making $17K a year. It was pretty bad and frankly I’d hesitate getting serious about someone with that much debt too.

My ex-boyfriend is a cheap bastard. I say that fondly though since that’s what he says about himself. He even said that during dinner about saving some tin boxes of mints I gave him years ago. He still has the boxes. Back then, his frugality embarrassed me. He’d make me take a free ice cream even when I didn’t want it, just so he could eat it himself, not that he really wanted the ice cream either. That just seemed tacky and wasteful to me. But perhaps he was right. That ice cream was going to melt and be uneaten anyway.

Lately I’ve been thinking about why I’ve been so interested in personal finance or the things that have influenced my burgeoning frugality. I used to think that I was always this way, but it’s not true. This particular ex-boyfriend definitely showed me a different way of viewing money. I never shopped at a Wal-Mart till I dated him. Wal-Mart didn’t exist where I lived growing up north of the Mason-Dixon line, but they did down South where he was raised.

He was really great about taking me out on free or inexpensive dates. He was also very sweet and took me out to some really good dinners or to the movies. We had a lot of fun on our small incomes. I think of it as one of those training steps changing my thinking about how to save and spend money.

He offered to take me to Ruth’s Chris in San Juan when we were picking restaurants, but I would have felt really awful about making him spend that kind of money on dinner after standing me up at the ferry. (His sailing trip went over long due to rough seas. I actually kind of worried about that when I saw lightning on the water.) I’m just not that vindictive or passive aggressive to make someone spend lots of money on me.

I got a lot of closure with our chat and it was good to know that since everything ended, we’re both in better places, financially speaking. It was a huge obstacle for us and frankly it’s good to know that we’re both better off now than we were before. I would hate to have so many years pass by and be stuck in the same financial mess as before.

The Frugal Duchess has a good post for merging finances in a relationship. My ex and I definitely got to the point where we discussed these things and I think her post has some really good advice for couples.

I took Flexo up on his offer. However, my new site isn’t ready yet. Not by a longshot. I need to learn CSS and PHP before I can get the new site looking anything like Blogger.

I spent a lot of time modifying the DOTS template so that it became dot-less in three columns with colors I didn’t mind staring at. And now I weep.

Don’t get me wrong. I think WordPress is going to be great. I was considering moving over when my parent had a stroke this spring, so I pushed it all off, and I am lucky that Flexo’s offer has come through just as my traveling schedule is slowing down.

However, I was silly not to realize that moving over is going to involve a lot of work to make stuff look pretty again. I really dislike using cookie-cutter templates which is why I underwent a lot of work to move off the dots in the first place.

Now it’s back to the drawing board as I figure out another programming language and web development. I suppose this can only be a career enhancing move for me since I an always put those letters on my resume for good use.

Who knows, maybe I’ll re-invent myself as a web developer with lots of PL/SQL experience.

Stay tuned. I’ll announce the new site when it’s something close to looking right.

JD on sin taxes.

Flexo will help you move off BlogSpot.

Madame X on how she tracks her savings. I think her system is too complicated, but I think she has more complicated expenses because of her job. For me, I just put the money into my accounts and total them up for the month. Quicken helps, but I still punch numbers into Excel to total stuff up for my NetworthHQ graph. Excel is your friend, it really is. Learn it. Love it.

Jim at Blueprint on home improvements. Check out the table of improvement resale values. I find it very interesting as I contemplate a window and roof replacement for my parents.

Debt Hater has a really awesome series on The Black Tax. I highly recommend it.

Udandi commented that HSBC has a Best Buy gift card bonus, which was mentioned at Boston Gal’s blog.

However, I’d argue that it’s not much of a bonus at all since I’d rather have a cash referral bonus for me and for my referrer. I know that there’s very little I’d want to get for $25 bucks at Best Buy and it’s a slippery slope. I would go straight for the $40 PSP games. Armed with a $5 off coupon, I’m still going to *spend* money rather than save it, so I’d say that it’s not much of a bonus at all. I’m not a big consumer of PSP games or electronic things.

I just spent $80 on two games in San Francisco at the Sony Metreon store when I was killing some time (due to lost my luggage). I think those are the last two games I’ll want for at least a year since I’m not a big gamer. I’m actually pretty lousy so it’s going to take me a while to beat the Katamari game. Heck, I even cut my thumbnails so I could play better, that’s how bad I am.

I had a really hard time finding HSBC’s rate card, and their CD’s all have $1000 minimums. I can get 5% rates from ING for short term CD’s for any amount, so it’s actually easier for me to lock up my funds and preserve the cash. I’d be getting pretty close to the same rate as HSBC as well.

I was being impulsive when I asked for referrals. I got fed up watching the rates for ING fall behind the other competitors, but being able to tie up my money into smaller $500 laddered CD’s is more appropriate for the amount of money I’m saving, plus I might be liquidating all of it soon for health and wedding expenses.

Flexo took the plunge though. Read and decide for yourself. I think I’m out for now.

Here’s a recent post from the Consumerist and the commenters really love ING for all the same reasons I do.

My car. I hate my car. I want to love my car, but I can’t. I took it in for the 90,000 mile service this week. It’s actually at 98,000 miles. The service alone costs $512.00. The report from the mechanic is that I need a new clutch ($1050), the aftermarket brakes I had installed in March make noise ($800), a fog light is out ($120) and various other fluids and belts need flushing and replacing ($500).

I did everything except the brakes, which I can never hear squeaking because I play the radio too loud, and the clutch. When I discussed this with a friend who’s driven my car before, he told me that he thinks my clutch is too tight and it really does need replacing. He’s kind of car savvy and says there’s something wrong with the pressure plate and that means my clutch is going. His opinion is that at 100K miles my clutch has done well and I should replace it now. I seriously thought I could go another year on it, but apparently not.

*sigh*

The reason I took the car in was because it needed the dealer servicing and I thought about selling my car this week. It’s only the second or third time I’ve taken it to the dealer for any kind of work. Why was I thinking of selling? A friend of mine wants a manual transmission for her son’s first car and we were discussing the possibility of selling my vehicle to her. I gave her a litany of things that would have to be fixed and that’s what prompted taking the car in to be thoroughly checked out. I had a pretty good idea of what was wrong with car, but I really didn’t think the clutch would have to be fixed till next year.

I ran the numbers and decided that I couldn’t sell the car because I didn’t want a car payment anymore. No matter what, not having a car payment is very important to me. I want to keep this car for another 4.5 years when it’s 10 years old. But frankly, I’m sick of driving it. I’m the only owner and all 98k miles on the car are mine. I want to love my car again, but I think I’d need to mod the car to fall back in love with it. I’d have to get better shocks and sticky tires so I could corner a lot tighter. I am not that interested in putting the sweat equity to do the modifications though, so that kind of destroys that option.

So why is this killing me? It’s killing me because I put it on my credit card and now I want to drain out my savings to pay down my credit card. Bah. *drama queen*

My Feedburner stats say there’s over 70 people or things reading what I have to say. Kinda crazy.

I want to give a special shout out to readers from David Bau’s blog. Welcome! *little bow*

David works for Google and I met him on a airplane a last year or the year before. It’s funny how a single encounter can change your life. I was reading a Java programming book, trying to understand what I was learning in class and really get my head around some code examples. David strikes up a conversation about programming with me, but just because someone is in a Google t-shirt, it doesn’t mean they work there. Well, in this case, it turns out that they do.

David was really encouraging about learning to code. If you read his blog, you’ll see that even his kid is learning to program. It’s a cute story. I really got inspired after our conversation because David builds things that make life better online. It’s small things that can be amazing things and he showed me that during our chat.

Shortly thereafter, I quit my hateful job doing tech support and found a more lucrative job programming. It’s probably not directly related to meeting David, but it was important that even a perfect stranger thought I could do this programming thing and that I come off as being smart and interesting in less than 10 minutes of talking.

As far as my Java skills go, I’m still not passing the J2EE exam anytime soon, but I can read a stack trace enough to troubleshoot. I never did finish my Towers of Hanoi program, but maybe I’ll make that my summer project.

‘Life is hard. Get a helmet.’

Jane Dough tells it like it is. Becoming wealthy is within reach if you want to do what you really have to do, spend less than you earn and save your money.

Kind of sucks to hear it out loud, but get used to it and end up with enough for retirement. Rather than rewards in paradise, I’d rather just not be destitute when I’m aged.

Earlier this morning I found Joel Maxwell’s link to my blog. I promised him I’d publish travel notes today. These are specific to my Puerto Rico trip and the wedding from last weekend. I hope you find some of them useful should you ever go there. As always I direct you to The Frugal Traveler column of the NYT. The writer is a close friend and he’s pretty savvy.

1) There really aren’t any buses. You will be taking cabs everywhere. And those cabs aren’t cheap. I hear there is a difference between a taxi and a publico, but darned if I really knew the difference. I guess a publico is the inter-city van service which I took between San Juan and Fajardo.

2) Cash is king. When you stay at a resort, cash tips go flying everywhere. Remember to bring lots of cash with you.

3) ATM? What’s that? You can’t find an ATM on Vieques, PR. Make sure you bring your own stash of traveler’s checks or something like that. San Juan has large banks like Citibank and Banco Popular, but you will get charged regular $2 ATM fees, though I hear you can have those waived by your bank if you call before you leave.

4) The ferry was kind of fun from Fajardo to Vieques, however, being tied to the ferry schedule sucked. For the amount of time I could have saved and done more sightseeing, I probably should have flown from San Juan to Vieques. In terms of money, the ferry is $2, but if you are traveling alone, it costs $80 from San Juan airport to the ferry dock and flying costs about $80 as well. Try to carpool to the ferry if you can. I split that trip with two other guests and saved money that way. However, I would have liked to get more sightseeing time by flying.

5) Getting stood up by your ex-boyfriend stinks. However, when he takes you out to dinner and tours old San Juan with you at night, it makes up for it. Plus his advice on the cheap hotels was right on the money and saves you a bundle. And yeah, he bought dinner and drinks since it was his fault that I spent the extra $80 on a taxi back to San Juan from the ferry. Getting told that you look really great: Priceless. There is another post in this one, but I’ll save it since it’s rather long.

What was the frugal tip here and not just being smug? Talk to friends and locals to find out where it’s *SAFE* and cheap to stay in town. Isla Verde in San Juan was reasonably safe, but a little grungy. If you’ve done the youth hostel thing, it was about the same as that. Not fancy, but serviceable.

6) Always get your manicure and pedicure the day BEFORE the wedding. Getting it done the day of when you’re in a rush is a sure fire way to get it all ruined. However, Creative ‘Glowing’ is a great color with a tan. There is no point in paying $25 for a nice manicure if you’re going to wreck it. (Which was picked up by the bride’s mom, so now I feel even guiltier for the mess on my fingers.)

7) No matter what your friend tells you, she is a liar and will buy you a present for being her maid of honor. It was really beautiful and well, I got a little verklempt during my toast. But it was because I was looking at her and I think she was getting verklempt too. Luckily there was no weeping to ruin the makeup. But that’s ok, I didn’t pay for a makeup job since I did my own.

I am definitely going to go back. I will probably also stay again at the really posh hotel for a night or two. If I do this trip once more, I will schedule it for the new moon so I can enjoy the bioluminescent sea life in the dark, and take some snorkeling/scuba lessons.

9) I never had a chance to shop for snacks before getting to the hotel. That’s ok because I only paid once or twice for meals at the hotel. I was eating mostly meals that were paid for as part of the wedding so I ate one meal at the spa, drinks at the bar a few times (which were comparable to drink prices in DC, if not cheaper). The bride and I did eat PB&J sandwiches in her suite right before the ceremony so we wouldn’t pass out during her vows. I also helped polish off someone’s orange juice and pound cake the next morning right before we all checked out.

10) If I had stayed an extra night at the resort, I probably would have enjoyed it a lot. The other girls who flew back to DC with me had wonderful souvenirs and experiences on Vieques for the rest of Sunday. However, I got a loss for France and a long wait by the ferry docks. Bah. I shouldn’t complain. It was still a good trip even if I missed out on really getting to know Puerto Rico.

11) Verizon doesn’t have service on Vieques, but Sprint and Cingular do. It returns once you get on the mainland though. I would check the charges before you go though. SMS works great out there and was a godsend as we tried to make logistical arrangements between the variously arriving parties of guests.