Wednesday was a great day. I sent out a large check to my dentist. My car is clean and pretty with a new set of engine mounts. It’s in tip top shape for this weekend’s road trip. However, I certainly wasn’t expecting to replace an engine mount today since I JUST REPLACED TWO OF THEM.

Turns out the 2001 Nissan Altima has 3 engine mounts and 1 transmission mount. The yahoos at the dealer replaced the rear two engine mounts earlier this year, but not the upper mount. Why did they not tell me that I had three? I would have done preventive maintenance then and put in a new one back in the spring. Geez. Does no one do anything thinking anymore? I like to think long-term on maintenance. I realize my opal blue baby is turning 7 on November 10th, but I’m not getting rid of her anytime soon. I am annoyed that they had to charge me twice for the labor when it could have all be handled once.

The total damage was ~$1220.00. Along with the mount, the battery was low, and the left axle was leaking fluid. Because I’m road tripping with a good, but very pregnant friend, I wanted to make sure the car was 100% is great condition before we left. Her husband is a bit paranoid and I wanted to make sure he had nothing to complain about. Otherwise, I would have just done an oil change and not bothered with the full check up on 120K-mile-service. I had a coupon for 10% off parts and labor, so the damage could have been worse. The freebies were the car rental, car wash and my next oil change gratis. I also paid $30 for them to order a new part for my interior molding since it’s coming loose. They promise not to charge for the labor when they install the molding in November, when I come back for inspection. At that time, I might also do the free oil change since I am entitled to one and I’m about to put 1000 miles on the car this weekend alone.

As for the dental bill, Single Ma, I am making progress. I never did get the payment plan agreement in writing as you suggested, but I did call them today to make sure they got the first payment of $500. They said they did and that my current balance is $2366.50. I let them know a check was being sent to them today for $800.00. The balance will then be $1566.50. Just two more payments and I’ll be done with it by the end of the year.

Why is it stagnating progress? Well, I was going to make some progress on the credit card front, but because I’m throwing cash at the dental bill, the auto maintenance charges went onto my credit card. I have no spare cash right now. Zero. Zip. I am not going to abort my road trip this weekend because that would be a failure of commitment on my part to my friend showing her goats in competition and to my pregnant friend for one last yarn show before the babe arrives. I will have cash in hand though and shouldn’t come away from the road trip with much in the way of credit card charges.

I acknowledge being a crappy budgeter. But again, I’m not suffocating. It just means shifting a bit. I did pretty good this month cooking more often at home, etc. Last night I bought a can of SPAM on the way home and an orange bell pepper. I am really digging fresh homemade fried rice lately. Cheap and tasty.

Alrighty, since having a dead PC does me no good, I put a priority in figuring out what was wrong on Tuesday night.

Turns out I left a memory card in the USB card reader and my PC was looking for a boot sector on the card, which doesn’t have one. DUH! I rarely reboot my machine, but I will occasionally warm start it and that was the cause of all my troubles.

I had made arrangements with one of my friends to buy an external hard drive from her. She gave me a 120GB Western Digital portable drive with a case and cable for $50 smackaroos. Easy peasy. I yanked the memory card out, the PC booted properly and all was good.

You can bet your bippy I backed that sh*t up ASAP as my first set of tasks. Then I was back in business.

Lessons for you:

1) Get an external hard drive and install it right away. They are cheap. A similar model from Western Digital is currently about $90 at Amazon. The one I got is an older model, but it was cheap and gets the job done. (I also did her a favor by taking it since it was just clutter she was trying to clean out.

2) BACK UP YOUR COMPUTER ASAP. Don’t put it off.

I got lucky here. This little scare got me off my duff. I had been looking at external drives for a while, but my analysis paralysis set in and I never ended up buying one, even though I’ve been inside a Best Buy about 5 times since February when I started thinking I needed one.

For me, I have a lot of open source or free software. If I had lost my motherboard, I’d end up buying another cheap desktop and getting MS Office pre-installed. (I really hate not having Excel, though my friend says I should use Open Office. Point taken, but I’m a total Excel junkie from doing accounting work when I was younger. I speak the language my end users speak and it’s kind of hard to make the mental switch. I mean, that’s why I hate using MS Works Spreadsheet. It’s just not as useful as Excel.) If I had lost only the hard drive, I would have gotten new boot disks and tried to recover as much as I could off the hard drive. If I had lost the fan, I would have cracked the case and asked one of my more hardware oriented friends to help me buy and install a new part. This machine is way out of warranty so I am no longer afraid of doing that. Heck. I might just do that anyway and upgrade the graphics card to something zippy.

I’ll stop with the hardcore nerding out now. The point is, $50 bucks for a hard drive is cheap for the peace of mind you get from having your files backed up. I swear, I was getting nervous about spending money because I couldn’t open Quicken to review my planned spending for the next two weeks. I was afraid I’d lose track while on vacation this weekend and overdraw my checking account.

A HUGE SIGH OF RELIEF HERE.

Back up! Save regularly! Don’t do dumb things like leave memory cards in readers when you’re rebooting!

PS- You may wish to consider helpful back up software like Norton or Ghost. I personally do not use Norton’s back up software, but I have used Ghost at work in the past for imaging PC’s. It was good stuff back in the day, but I am not familiar with current releases. (Geez, when did Norton buy Ghost? Man, I’m feeling old!)

Did you guys ever play Fortunately/Unfortunately when you were a kid? This was an imaginative story exercise I did in first or second grade. I had a lot of fun and I still remember it. You start a sentence “Fortunately” or “Unfortunately” and then write something to move the story along. For instance, “I was walking along the woods when fortunately I found a pretty looking egg. Unfortunately, it was a dragon egg. But fortunately, my dad is a dragon trainer. Unfortunately my mom didn’t want me to have a dragon, etc.”

You get the idea. Well here’s a fortunately-unfortunately story for you.

Unfortunately, my computer died.
Fortunately, I was planning on buying a laptop anyway.
Unfortunately, I won’t be getting it for a few weeks.
Fortunately, I’m not too computer ignorant and can do some repairs.
Unfortunately, I don’t have backups.
Fortunately, I will be getting an external hard drive for free or cheap soon from a friend.
Unfortunately, I may not be able to retrieve all my data.
Fortunately, I don’t consider photos to be irreplaceable.
Unfortunately, this is going to take a bit of time.
Fortunately, I still have computer access by other means.
Unfortunately, I cannot always control when I can use it.
Fortunately, this is all a temporary condition.
Unfortunately, I am impatient and wish it would resolve sooner.
Fortunately, I am determined to get through this.
Unfortunately, I have to take my car into the dealer for a check up and I think I will be spending a lot of money.
Fortunately, I have stopped the 401k contribution so I have extra cash each month.
Unfortunately, the extra money is budgeted for something else.
Fortunately, I have an emergency fund CD expiring in December.
Unfortunately, that’s far away from now and I am not sure this is a true emergency because it’s maintenance.
Fortunately, I have been trying to save money by dining out less.
Unfortunately, I made extra chicken stock but have been lazy and let it spoil.
Fortunately, it doesn’t really mean anything to my grocery budget to lose it.
Unfortunately, I committed to going to a yarn show in NY next weekend.
Fortunately, I know I am not allowed to buy anything but food, gas and hotel.
And even more fortunately, my friends and I are cool with taking lots of snacks and drinks for the hotel.
Unfortunately, there will be a lot of temptation to buy neat things.
Fortunately, I am taking a green shawl project of handspun wool to remind me I don’t need anything.
Unfortunately, it’s the second time I have tried a shawl out of this yarn, and I still don’t like it.
Fortunately, it’s for me and it doesn’t matter.
Unfortunately, this trip means I won’t be going grocery shopping the next few days.
Fortunately, I have stocked my shelves with food.
Unfortunately, I will still need to buy lunches to round out meals.
Fortunately, I have coupons I can use to buy food at the new office location.
Unfortunately, that means my old punchcards are useless because we’re too far from our old location.
Fortunately, the new cafeteria still has food by the pound.
Unfortunately, I can eat a lot and they have a wide-variety of juices and soft drinks.
Fortunately, I am committed to bringing my own drinks from home right now.
Unfortunately, I am a sucker for Tropicana orange juice.
Fortunately, my team still keeps a fridge hidden under our desk and I can buy half gallons if I want them.

And on that upbeat note, I’ll end this post because as you can see, it could go on endlessly in a silly fashion.

Hello Gentle Readers,

I must apologize to users coming from the AOL.com domain. I think my spam filter is blocking you. If you think you’ve been blocked, please email me.

Also, my blogroll seems to have disappeared with my migration from one server to another. I’ll try to get that back when I have a chance. It seems like a good time to tell you what my policy is for adding blogroll links.

1) I have to actually read the blog. I don’t link what I don’t read.
2) The blog must be at least 3 months old and updated regularly.
3) It has to look good. I’m a snob for aesthetics. Blogs that are overladen with ads aren’t too pretty. Of course, if a blog has awesome original content, I’ll still add it, but I’ll just tease the blogger for the ugliness.

If you really would like to surf my blogroll, try visiting PFBlogs.org’s Personal Finance listing. A great many of the blogs I read on this topic were discovered there.

Thanks for your patience!

That was Friday AND Saturday!

On Friday, I had a peanut butter sandwich for lunch. I ran out of lunch meat. For dinner, my friend took me out because I am letting him crash on my pull out couch for the weekend. Since my friend is unable to work a lot of hours, he’s on a serious budget for this trip. (Death in the family.) We didn’t really plan to do dinner really cheaply, but my friend was looking at the crab cake entree or the down-home fried chicken at Logan Tavern in DC. I noticed the crab cake was also an appetizer and the chicken looked delicious to me as well. Earlier I had made some remarks about getting fatter since college. (We’re really old friends.) So my friend suggests that we get the appetizer to split and then ask to split the entree. It was a really good idea. Since he’s picking up the check, I get a delicious meal guilt free without having too many calories.

Because my friend needed a sweet treat for dessert, I passed on Thomas Sweet ice cream because parking in Georgetown on a Friday night sucks. (Honestly, is it any better than Coldstone’s Cake Batter ice cream with almonds and caramel?) Instead, we stopped at 7-Eleven and got a pint of Breyer’s Butter Pecan ice cream. I feel bad I didn’t have any chocolate syrup at home. That would have been cool. So my spend on Friday was $2.04. That’s $1.99 for ice cream and a nickel for tax.

On Saturday, I was working all day for my friend’s dad and his barbecue catering business. She called me last minute because they were in a huge pinch. I ain’t too proud to wear an apron and get a sunburn on a gorgeous Saturday. My friend drove me back and forth. The only things I bought were some groceries on the way home. I needed some cookies to take to a christening party on Sunday and I found a few dark chocolate bars (70+% cacao) for me and my boss. It was about $15 at Trader Joe’s for everything. I netted out very well since there was a little compensation. More than I expected and I got tasty bratwursts to take home.

Sunday wasn’t a No Spend Day. I had yummy brunch before the christening and I had to buy some bandages for my feet because of the heels I was wearing. My feet were killing me. Brunch for two was $33 and bandages and tape were about $10. Even so, that was pretty good. No groceries for me this week as I am not going to be around much to eat them. I will be living off my pantry this week and paying my oral surgeon a fat chunk of money.

I’ve been really good this week and yet, really bad. Thursday was another Almost No Spend Day. I forgot to mention that I do spend money daily on tolls to and from work. But that doesn’t really register since it’s automatic. An overview of teh week.

The Bad:

I bought an “In Your Face Dave Ramsey” $4 Pumpkin Spice coffee at Starbucks yesterday.

I also bought a $2 tea at Starbucks while I was knitting.

I had to buy gas ~$25, but I chose not to fill up at the super expensive station near work.

I ate at the new cafeteria at work since we relocated and wanted to check out our dining options. $15.33 for two meals with extras like snacks to take back to my desk.

The Good:

I went to a concert and dinner for free, courtesy of my laddie.

By not filling up my gas tank completely, I waited to fill the rest of the way at the really cheapo gas station near my house. I see they dropped their price by $.02 a gallon this morning, beating the station near work by $.07. (On a full tank, that’s nearly a dollar. So mental note, the best buy really is near home.)

By bringing sandwich fixings and drinks to work, I could choose to eat in the cafeteria, but lightly. I also fixed myself something to eat so I wouldn’t buy dinner at Starbucks or the expensive but delicious Italian restaurant next door.

Through a volunteer gig I have, I am learning about “Step Down Budgeting”. This means easing into budget changes and building better spending habits. For instance, I really dislike sandwiches for lunch. I prefer hot meals. By trying to bring my lunch to work once or twice a week, I’m not going cold turkey on buying lunch every day, nor am I feeling deprived because I’ve cut myself off the hot-turkey-open-faced sandwich-with-gravy gravy train. Currently with turkey sandwich fixings in the fridge, I can choose to buy lunch or choose to be frugal and fix lunch. When I am motivated to keep practicing frugality, I can pack more lunches and cut back on buying lunch even further. Step Down Budgeting is about making choices and moving towards cutting the budget gradually so you don’t feel the pinch and do a 180 on budgeting. It’s to keep you from setting up for failure because it’s all too easy to say “I hate budgeting because it doesn’t work for me. I can’t keep a budget.”

Oh, so how did I do this week on lunch? Well I got the bread and turkey cold cuts on sale. The Muenster cheese wasn’t on sale though, but my co-worker likes it and sometimes I share my food so it doesn’t go to waste. I ate all the turkey and cheese and have half a loaf left of bread waiting for next week. I plan on having a PBJ today for lunch. I also had about a quart of potato soup from earlier this week. I brought in some Pepsi I bought on sale and a can of tomato soup, which was a very nice add-on to the cold turkey sandwich. (Did I mention I like hot food?)

Food is the bane of my budget. But slowly, with Step Down Budgeting, I’ll get there.

Do you have any examples of stepping down slowly to hit your budget targets?

I have added and refreshed my old PF Book Review page.

Please note, I have a few other books I’m working on and so look for some more reviews in October and November.

Titles to look forward to:
The Tao of Warren Buffett
Moving Up To Millions
The Intelligent Investor

For now, I recommend bookmarking the existing page because I will keep adding to it as I read more stuff.

Sorry for the site freeze yesterday. I think I was getting spam attacked in my trackbacks, so the ISP disabled me. Flexo, my blog savior, moved me over to a different server and worked some serious magic to get me back up within 24 hours. He totally rocks for offering free hosting and help. In life you get what you pay for, but I got an exceedingly good deal here. He is generous to me, but also with the PFBlogs.org Challenge at DonorsChoose.org.

If you see anything wonky, please let me know via email. The About Me box in the left sidebar has me email ID for Gmail.

Thanks!

ps- I know about the MySQL issue on the right sidebar.

Ramit and the savvy beggar. The beggar story is fascinating, but Ramit’s point about time-tested analysis of our actions and not just muttering about them. I suppose that’s the reason why I blog and put up little bar graphs on my progress and setbacks.

Grocery shopping tips learned the hard way at Single Ma’s Fabulous Financials.

Jonathan at My Money Blog on spending and saving and being comfortable in your choices. The discussion in the comments is interesting.

Penny Nickel at Money and Values offers us a wallet resource to consult before we purchase. I love it because the list of questions on it are some of the same things I ask myself, especially “Do I really need this?”

The Almost No Spend Day post got posted 4 times because there were some issues with WordPress and my domain today. I’ve deleted the three extra ones tonight when I realized what happened.

Yes, Single Ma, I find that it’s easy not to spend money when I hide in my apartment. But a girl has gotta get out of the house every once in a while and throw down on the dance floor like nobody’s business. If all goes well with my upgrade, I’ll be grooving out to Carl Cox in a few weeks… Uh, that’s after I go to another yarn show at Rhinebeck. I had a great time last year and I’ll be going with my friend who is showing her goats at the competition. Four to a room and we’re packing food with us. Nobody feels a particular need to blow the budget. We’re planning one fine meal together early on so that my friend can do her livestock association events without us. A little planning goes a long way here.

*yawn* Time for the sleeping now.