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I was going to wait until closer to the end of the month to pay extra money towards our credit cards, but I decided to do it right now. A tactic I often use is to pay extra when we can so the money is out of our account and we can no longer spend it. While having a cushion in our checking account is nice, more often than not it ends up being spent.
Our debt total has now broken below the $17,000 mark and it sits at $16,964. I was thinking about putting the extra money towards our savings, but I couldn’t resist making our credit card debt below 17K. The next time we have extra money, it will go towards increasing the amount in our savings.
I think for a while, we will do things like that. We’ll take turns paying off debt or contributing more to our savings.
The past four days have gone by too fast. Tomorrow, it is back to work. But I feel so much better after having some time off and having some time with my husband and son.
My son and I baked cookies, although we made sugar cookie dough on Sunday and we were going to bake them on Monday. That didn’t happen because the saran wrap around the dough wasn’t quite sealed tightly enough and the dough hardened. Luck have it, we had a friend over Christmas Eve night and his mom insisted that he brought over…sugar cookies 
I’m not sure if anything else can beat the pure amazement of a child on Christmas day. His eyes widened at a few of his presents and he ended up playing with almost all of them today. Sometimes I wish I could bottle up that excitement and innocense. I think that is the reason I tend to go overboard with Christmas. It’s for that genuine reaction.
Santa was very practical with some gifts, and my son was happy to receive them as well. I thought for sure he’d frown when he saw that Santa brought him underware, but he was pretty happy. Perhaps that is because my son was very practical with the presents he picked out for mom and dad.
Mom received a little back massager and a small mirror. He remembered that I thought the massager felt good the one time we tried it in the store and that is what he picked out. As for the mirror, I am always losing mine so he bought me another one.
Dad received a pillow and a blanket. He often sits on our free couch and asks for a blanket to use to help pad the area next to the wood arm of the couch. Without any prodding, my son came up with the idea to get dad a pillow for the couch (we don’t have any pillows for our couches). Then, he decided to get a blanket that matched.
I have to admit that I am pretty proud of his choices. I thought for sure mom and dad would end up with toys
Pretty soon we will take down our Christmas decorations and before we know it another year will have passed. Time is going by too fast. Time to kick up our debt reduction a notch or two to get out of debt sooner than later.
With that, it’s time for me to take a look at our finances and see how much we can put towards our debt right now. I was going to wait until closer to the end of the month, but I better do it now so there is no temptation with the after-Christmas sales (although I will shop them to get some cheap wrapping paper and Christmas cards for next year).
So far, I am enjoying my time off and I am enjoying that I have the next two days off as well. I haven’t caught up on as many blog-related items as I had hoped, but I got to spend some nice time with my son this morning baking cookies.
We baked chocolate chip cookies, toffee cookies and we make the dough to make sugar cookies tomorrow. Of course, Santa will have a feast of cookies set out tomorrow night. My son wouldn’t have it any other way!
I am going to take a blogging break the next few days and center on family-related items. Come Wednesday, I’ll be back.
With that, I’d like to wish all of you a Happy Holiday.
I’m pretty happy about Friday this week. I don’t have to go back to work until Wednesday and I was offered an official writing gig (more on that later). I could use a little R&R with time off to relax a bit and catch up with blog-related items. And of course, I can always use some extra cash from the writing gig 
Now here’s some articles that caught my eye this week:
Bob at Christain PF has a giveaway for an iPod Nano. Hurry! The deadline is 11:59 CST on Dec. 24. (He’s also giving away YNAB Budgeting Software too!)
Mapgirl discusses internal networking and how it might lead to new opportunities. Very interesting – I’ve never thought of it like that.
Plonkee has some tips on how to celebrate a frugal Christmas. Something we do yearly is drive around and look at Christmas lights.
Enjoy!
You hear arguments about renting versus buying when it comes to homes, but what about other things? Right now we are having a little dilemma with renting versus buying a steam carpet cleaner. Our carpet was purchased new (on credit) shortly after we moved into our house. The carpets have never been cleaned, and with pets and a child in the house, they are looking pretty bad.
In the past, I probably would have bought the steam carpet cleaner on credit and that would have been that. Now, though, every big decision is looked at carefully. What is the better thing to do in this case? Should we rent a steam cleaner for around $25 or should we buy a lower end (but well rated) model for $150?
Since I’m really not sure what to do, it’s time to look at the pros and cons.
Pros of Owning a Steam Cleaner
- No time constraints to get a job done
- Having it available would lead to the carpets being cleaned on a regular basis
Pros of Renting a Steam Cleaner
- No worries about equipment breaking
- Better grade equipment and continual upgrades
Cons of Owning a Steam Cleaner
- Larger initial cost
- Maintenance/repair costs
Cons of Renting a Steam Cleaner
- You never know who used it before you and exactly what they cleaned
- Time constraint to finish a job
Right now, the biggest reason why I would want to own our own steam cleaner is the fact that we could use it anytime and if it takes a week to finish cleaning all of our carpets – that’s okay. With my schedule, it’s difficult to have a huge block of time to dedicate to cleaning carpets. I used to work for a company that rented out steam cleaners (a very small portion of their business). I’d say about 5% of the customers I talked to with would tell me how they didn’t get the job done so they’ll have to rent again another time.
The biggest reason why I am hesitating on purchasing our own steam cleaner is the price. We technically have the money and we could buy one right now without having to put it on credit. But that’s a bit of money to spend on something for the home that you may only use a few times a year.
In this case, I think the decision is a little harder because after six uses of a purchased steam cleaner, you would break even with renting. After that sixth carpet cleaning, it would be free cleaning (not exactly free, but I think you know what I mean). It’s not like in the case where you rent a car for a day for $80 and it costs over $17,000 new. If I only needed to use a car one day a month for a year, I’d rent the car and wouldn’t think twice about doing it ($960). There’s a big price difference there.
I’m not sure why, but these little decisions are tough. I’ve been thinking about it off and on for about a month now hoping to come to a conclusion, but I haven’t. I even googled “renting versus buying a steam cleaner” and didn’t come up with much.
What do you think when it comes to these smaller scale renting versus buying situations?
I’m a little late, but this post is a reply to NCN’s request to learn about the charities that personal finance bloggers are supporting this year.
I’ll be the first to admit that we do not give enough to charity throughout the year. Instead, we tend to do a lot of donating around Christmas time. One of my favorite things to do is to I put my thrifty skills to work to get as many toys as I can for the local Toys for Tots program. We went this past weekend and did that and I had a blast!
In addition to that, I give a larger donation to a single entity. For the past month, I’ve been thinking about an organization to support this year. As most of you know, I support Modest Needs and I’ve been giving some money here and there. I feel in my heart, though, that I want to give a larger donation to an organization closer to home this year.
Thinking back to my roots, there is one organization that I can think of that had a direct influence on my life. I believe that many of my good traits come from being a part of the music program during grade school. It taught me discipline, teamwork, patience, dedication, etc. The sad thing is, sometimes when school systems are having budget problems…the music programs are close to the chopping block. While I was in school, I remember at least one time where there was buzz that the music program would be stopped. Thankfully, the program remained and I was a part of it for eight years of my young life.
I’d like to give back a little, so I am sending a donation to the music program at my grade school. It’s not a lot, but hopefully it can go towards new instruments or maybe some sheet music. Who knows? Maybe someone else is thinking the same thing this year and our donations can work together towards something bigger.
If you are wondering who to give to this year, I have one suggestion. Look to your heart and think about what is important to you. With doing that this year, not only did I figure out who to donate to this year, I also had some smiles going down memory lane
Look up…what do you think of the new header? I love it! I worked with the gentleman who did my blog theme (Dave at 1955 Design) and we came up with the above. I told Dave I needed something up there with more “oomph” to help keep me going when things may not be going well financially.
The purple and green colors of my site help a lot with that. They are what I like to refer to as my “happy colors.” But I needed something else to help keep me pointed in the right direction. I think the new header fits that bill. It makes me want to kick some debt butt!
2008…here we come!!!
Thanks again to Dave for the new header
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About This Site
My Debt
- Original Debt: $97,293.06
- Paid: $1,927.89
- Remaining: $95,365.17
- Emergency Fund: $1100
- Broken Down
- Line of Credit 2: $0.00
- Line of Credit 1: $0.00
- Credit Card 1: $0.00
- Credit Card 2: $245.00
- Credit Card 3: $405.00
- Credit Card 6: $1,785.00
- Credit Card 7: $2,381.17
- Consolidation Loan: $11,000.00
- Credit Card 10: $14,519.00
- Auto Loan 1: $16,093.00
- Credit Card 11: $23,873.00
- Auto Loan 2: $25,064.00
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- Beachgirl’s Budget Blog
- Becoming and Staying Debt Free
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- Debt Free Hispanic
- Debt Kid
- Debt Reduction 101
- Dual Income No Kids
- Everybody Loves Your Money
- Financial Hack
- Free Money Finance
- From the Brink of Bankruptcy
- Generation X Finance
- GRACEful Retirement
- Grad Money Matters
- It’s Your Money
- Josephsangl.com
- Kick Debt’s Butt
- Lazy Man and Money
- Low Income Life
- Make Love Not Debt
- Mapgirl’s Fiscal Challenge
- Mighty Bargain Hunter
- Money, Matter and More Musings
- My 1st Million at 33
- No Credit Needed
- One Million and Beyond
- Personal Finance Advice
- pfblogs.org
