So how are you planning to celebrate? As I said last year, back in university, being among nerdy engineers pretty much 24/7, March 14 was always a date that we had circled on the calendar. While most university students eagerly anticipated March 17, we engineers did most of our drinking on March 14 and quizzed each other on how many digits we’d memorized. Right now, 14 years later, I can still ring off 3.1415926535… Ridiculous. Anyway, I don’t have anything exciting planned for M...

Yesterday marked the 11th consecutive day that the balance of my 401k went up. I’ve been keeping track on a daily basis since July 21, 2005 and that’s *never* happened. The dollar amounts have been higher, yes, but it’s never progressed consistantly for this length of time. I haven’t had a “down” day since February 25th. Of course, now that I’ve mentioned it, the bears will come out on Monday… Beware the Ides of March… Still, though, I’...

Over the weekend, I bought a vacuum cleaner. Not exactly exciting or out of the ordinary stuff on its own until I tell you that I bought it used *and* I paid just shy of $800 for it. Say what? Yep, see, of late (and for the last 7 years) we’ve been getting by using a $60 piece of crap Eureka upright that I bought at Ames (when they were still in business) and my wife’s much nicer Hoover upright. I say it’s nicer because it has a headlight, you know, for those night time vacuum...

First off, I want to say that I can’t *believe* that no one commented on the pink snowman… I’m going to go on record (again) and proclaim that I think that it was super awesome. Anyway… February turned out to be a pretty profitable month for me but looks can be deceiving… I mean, anytime that you suddenly find $3847 extra in your checking account, well, it’s probably going to be a good month. Outside of that, I was “up” in every category except for...

Last night I posted that I’d managed to only spend $2999.72 for the entire month of February. Well, already today, just one day into the month of March, I’ve spent more than that. Yep, $2000 towards the mortgage, $900+ to the fine folks at Allstate for auto insurance, and a couple hundred dollars as a business tax payment… And it gets worse — we have a few pricey auto repairs on the horizon (this coming weekend), the need for a new vacuum cleaner (this week, hopefully),...

Sure, February’s the shortest month of the year but I’m still inconspicuously patting myself on the back for a job well done. This isn’t the smallest sum that I’ve ever reported but it’s pretty close. In short, I think that this is about the best I can do without pinching pennies to the point that our standard of living takes a dip *and* still overpay on the mortgage by such a large amount. This also marks the 12th month that I’ve been reporting my spending. ...

Okay, I’m ditching the goal of finally getting a Roth IRA account set-up and fully funded in 2010. It isn’t that I can’t afford to do it… It’s just that a good old fashioned incandescent light bulb finally lit up (powered by knob & tube wiring) and I re-remembered why I’d never opened an account in the first place. The big hurdle that I don’t want to have to confront is all that business about access to the money. Specifically, it’s the lack...

I’ve been *so* behind with posting over the last few months so much so that I didn’t even do my annual “I Filed my Taxes Today” post this year. Cutting to the chase, I filed my taxes back on February 13. It was a fun filled Saturday morning spent in front of the computer telling TurboTax that, no, once again, I did not earn any income working on a farm and I don’t have an illegal alien working as a maid and living under the basement steps. Seriously — you spe...