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Half way into Feb

Posted: 23 days ago by Justin | Comment

2 more weeks down. Let’s see what’s going on.

Eat better
Still going good, minus the drive-thru cheeseburger I had tonight.

Eat out less
See about

Become dinner party people
Had lunch with an old co-worker, had a dinner party at a neighbor’s place, went to a work happy hour and went to a copywriter happy hour – all in the last month.

Become handy
I jinxed us last time. I said nothing had broken and then the plumbing broke. It’s not something I can fix – it’s a major job. Pretty much replacing our WW2-eras pipes. Fixing that will put other projects on hold, so this resolution is on hold for a bit.

Pay off my car loan
Put $40 more towards the loan by not spending all of my monthly spending cash. My new goal is to pay this loan off by August – since we’ll have a kid come August. I worked it out and it’s an extra $324 a month. It’s an aggressive goal to say the least.

Be good
I can finally tell you what this resolution means – Be a good dad. It’s going to be my main goal once the little one is here. Rachel bought me Bill Cosby Fatherhood, so I’m well on my way.

[GRADING SYSTEM EXPLAINED]

Life [, ]

Savings calling

Posted: 6 days ago by Justin | Comment

Sorry, that was a terrible pun on “Avon calling” but the title “The 5 minute phone call that saved me $5 a month” was too long.

As a stated a little bit ago, I’m going to have to get creative with how I continue to plug away at my car loan. ebay has been a good source of extra income – selling old toys in the attic, etc – and I’ve still got a few things to sell. But eventually that well is going to run dry.

So I turned to my bills to see what could be cut. I had to adjust my monthly budget anyways since a bus pass costs more this year so it was the perfect time to dig into the math.

The bill that looked most out of sorts to me was my cellphone bill. I’m not a big phone user, but the bill was pretty high. A friend who’s also not a big phone talker recently went to pre-paid and loves it. So I decided to look into the option.

After looking at past phone bills I figured out that I used around 225 minutes a month and 50+ text messages. My current plan had me at 400 minutes with unlimited text for $50.

Looking into pre-paid plans, I could get 200 minutes a month for $30 plus $5 for unlimited texting. (No matter where I went, it was cheaper to do unlimited texting.)

I checked online with Verizon, but I was already on their cheapest (advertised) plan. So I called Verizon to see if they could lower the bill. When I got a person I simply said, “I’m calling to see if you have a cheaper plan. I’m not using all of my minutes a month.” I figured I’d break out the big guns of, “I’m going to switch to a pre-paid plan with another company” only if I needed to.

The lady took a minute to look at my plan and usage and said, “It looks like you could easily use our 300 minute plan. It will save you $5 a month.” So we got that set up and now I’m paying $45 for 300 minutes and unlimited texting.

It’s still not as cheap as a pre-paid plan, but switching seemed like it was going to be a pain in the ass. Plus, I can leave any time and this way I don’t have to make sure I don’t go over 200 minutes.