I have 2 projects I've been working on. The first is scanning and reorganizing the pictures I inherited from my cousin and the ones she had from her mother. Today I finally got everything out of the albums. Next project is scanning them. I've learned 2 things from this endevour so far. 1) never use tape in a photo album. 20 years later, peeling off the pictures from the tape is a headache...especially if the pages are already self adhesive. 2) lable the pictures as if 20 years later your niece will be going through it. I have no clue who half the people in these pictures are. Luckily, I'll be visiting granny soon. She should be able to help. My Facebook family will fill in some of the blanks, and my father will fill in others.
Which brings me to a new goal. I'm going to start interviewing important people in my family. They're dieing off and they're taking with them so much rich and vibrant family history. Might even turn it into a book or something... Nothing to publish, just something to keep for the family.
The next project is to clean all my crappy paperback novels from my library and either put them on my kindle or purchase a hard cover or nicely bound edition. I've bought 4 books total and downloaded a bunch of free books. It's cleaned out a foot of book space so far. I'm not even 1/3 done going through my library either.
Reading to joe has been put on hold. He's been too busy and working nights. I'm hoping to pick it back up this coming week. In the meantime, I've been reading hans Christian andersons fairy tales.its slow going, but I'm 7% done. That's about 2 fairy tales a night.
I'm a tad disappointed that the kindle I got doesn't have a backlight function, but as that and the printer/scanner were under $90, I'm not complaining. I'll get a better one in a few years when I can afford high end gadgets.
Speaking of money, I'm so glad that I've been trained by curcumstance to live off $12k a year or less. I get about $900 a month from disability. With that, and my way with money, I've paid my credit card debt down from $6000 early this year to $1000. I plan on getting that paid off by Christmas, refinancing my student loans and starting to work paying those off. Normally I'd save some money too, but when you're on disability, you can't have more than 2000 in money's. What this means is my credit cards have become my safety buffer, which isn't good, but it's not horrible either considering I could be drowning further into the cesspool of debt. I found out my credit score finally made it into the top 50%. I'm stoked about that. I've always had horrible credit because of the amount of debt I accrued.
So, here's a brake down of my budget. Some of this I split 2 ways with joe:
$300 on rent. (We lucked out on the house.)
$100 on electricity. This normally carries from $20-$100 depending on how energy conscious we are and how much ac we use.
$20 on internet
$25 on water and sanitation
$50 on entertainment
$70 for groceries, which would be a meager budget only enough for eggs, rice, beans, peanut butter, the occasional fruit, and frozen veggies. But I only need to plan for 2 meals with that: breakfast, which is eggs, English muffin, oatmeal and/or yogurt. And lunch which is also inexpensive, normally rice or a sandwich. Dinners I splurge on with:
$140 for Blue Apron. I can't say how much I love this service enough!
$100 budgeted for health, doctors, prescriptions, etc. starting in October this will increase, but I'll manage.
$32 for pet insurance. The peace of mind is well worth it, especially with bald as history of egg binding.
$30 for pet food and supplies.
The rest goes into a mic expenses, that if unspent gets thrown at my debt. It's normally unspent.
I've also found it helpful that if your having trouble paying a bill, open communication and a willingness to work with the billing department will go a long way.
I think tomorrow I'll bust out some finance tips for people...maybe.
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