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Archive for March, 2008

A comedy of errors...

March 15th, 2008 at 09:56 am

I often read fellow bloggers writing about "eating out" as a big wa$te of money. In light of this, I thought many of you would find this anecdote rather funny...

Hubby and I (bagged from the work week) decided to go out for dinner to tonight at around 8p.m. We couldn't decide on a place close to our house, so we decided to go to an Earl's a bit farther away in Vancouver (we live in Coquitlam). We drive all the way there and there is absolutely NO parking and a line-up a mile long at the neighbouring Swiss Chalet. We get back in the car and decide to try another place and are told there is a minium of a "half hour wait."

Teaches us to try to find grub at 8p.m. on a Friday - date night central. Married people need to eat too ya know! Big Grin

We ended up driving all the way back to our neighbourhood and had a mediocre steak. Oh, and a drink each.

$71.00 and a tank of gas!!!

Long story short, it wasn't worth it. Any good meal planning sites out there?

Interesting article.

March 11th, 2008 at 11:26 am

I found the following article to be quite interesting:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/personal/03/07/consumer.spending/index.html

Especially this passage:

"It's almost as if travel is no longer discretionary spending. Americans are working harder, longer. They may not like their jobs, and they don't get a lot of time off. So when they get a vacation, they're going," he says. "Maybe the new car or the new lawn mower will take a backseat. Maybe people won't eat out as much. But they're going on vacation."



This really is true in our household. We have really cut back on eating out and have cut back on boring things like electricity usage, but we still took our vacations. I think people still feel they deserve a treat after working hard, but in tough times it has to be something more tangible, something less out and out wasteful like an overpriced coffee or gossip mag.

a new financial move for me

March 10th, 2008 at 01:05 am

I've done something financially that I've never had to do before. My and hubby's credit cards have been carrying approximately a $3000 balance respectively for the past three months that we just can't seem to get a handle on paying them down. We both have lines of credit that only charge 11.5% interest as opposed to the 19% charged to us by our credit cards, so I paid the cc's off with our lines of credit.

I don't really want to get into this mode, but for now it makes sense. Being stubborn about not going down that road would have defnitely cost us more in the long run.

The expenses all came from somewhat "obligatory travel" in the form of two weddings. Oh well - our term deposit is coming due as well as our tax returns. We should be debt free again come May.

Thanks for reading. Smile