I've got four gift cards in process right now - $20 for Bed Bath & Beyond, $20 for Circuit City, $20 for Lowe's and $40 in gas certificates. I've written down the dates I signed up for each, to make sure that I cancel within 30 days. I'm toying with the idea of selling the Circuit City and BB&B cards on eBay. Haven't decided yet. (Just looked on ebay, and the cards seem to generally go for about 80% of their face value. Seems worth it to me if I'm not likely to use them myself. When I signed up for them, I figured I'd got he eBay route with them.)

I'll total up my February AdSense revenue for my homeschool and tutoring sites, as well as my credit card roundups and add those amounts to my challenge account. I don't think I have any half.com sales for February, but I'll double-check. (I checked - already added the one sale into my account. Looks like I have about $18 in credit card round-ups to add, and about $14 in AdSense.)

April is right around the corner, and that's when I'm planning on reopening my boutique at DivaTribe. I've got my bath and body products already, and I ordered some jewelry from a favorite designer a couple of days ago. I need to finish up photos of my own items and make sure some of the technical ins and outs of the site are working - sales tax, credit cards, etc.

I'm thinking about taking a percentage of my sales and putting them in my challenge account. Nothing big, maybe 5%. Between advertising, buying materials and products and trying to actually make some money at this so DH doesn't have to work so many freelance hours, I need this to make some money.

Wrestling with expenses versus income... wants versus needs... the feeling of having enough and all that we need versus feeling deprived...

Pity party here today. Disregard.

Our cars and home are all insured through Allstate. I made a call this afternoon to discuss the coverage on one of our cars, and long story short, we're now saving about $210 a year! I increased our deductibles and took off the comprehensive and collision on the 12-year-old car. Our coverage is better now, and we're saving some money. It pays to call!

For 2/1 - 2/20:
Groceries: $362.87 (goal: $300)
Dining: $151.18 (goal: $160)

Disclaimers/Rationalizations
All of the food and supplies for DD's birthday party are in the groceries category, and if I really wanted to, I'd separate that out and classify it as entertaining. Also, we went out to a nice dinner to celebrate her birthday and mine before going to the ballet. I'm feeling unmotivated to do get real picky about it all and will just accept that February's food spending is going to be higher due to her birthday and mine.

I don't know if it's a coincidence or not, but my AdSense revenue for today for my tutoring site is great. I'd love it if it could continue on like this as a result of those site submissions I made last night! We'll see....

I did a Google search for "homeschool math tutor" and found a few sites to submit my tutoring site to this evening. Hopefully it will get added and send some more traffic and business my way. With the right kind of student, asynchronous tutoring is great.

Anyone need any Calculus tutoring?

I made a few changes to the text on my tutoring web site, hoping to get it picked up ina few more ways by Google and such. I also went into my listing at dmoz.org and submitted an updated site description there. More traffic to my site means hopefully more business and more AdSense revenue too, which gets added to my challenge money each month.

I picked up two finance books today at the library: Start Late, Finish Rich, by David Bach, and The Millionaire Next Door, by Thomas J. Stanley, Ph. D. and William D. Danko, Ph. D. I'm looking forward to reading them - I started skimming TMND earlier this afternoon and found it interesting from the first pages.

A couple of years ago, DH and I met with a financial planner. We didn't click with him at all, for a variety of reasons, and never pursued a working relationship with him. One of his tactics was all about scaring. Terrorists were mentioned. Whatever. One thing he did say that backfired was telling us how so few people are able to retire today and live the life they want to live. Dh and I had the same thought and discussed it later: my parents both retired early, and his father retired at a relatively young/normal age, while his mother was always an at-home mother to four kids. My mom was a SAHM until I was about 9 or 10. Both of our families are living the kinds of retirements they want to. They have enough money to do what they want, and they can pay for emergencies when they arise. They have plenty in savings, own their homes and cars, etc. etc. etc. They don't look wealthy, but they're definitely comfortable. Dh and I want that for ourselves someday.

The point in all of this? DH and I try to model our financial lives after what we see in our parents, so to have a financial advisor try to scare us about no one being able to retire comfortably was just plain the wrong way to try and snag our business.

DH emailed me today that bonuses don't look likely at work this year. Bummer. Apparently when the owners of the company get more involved, budgets get cut, as do bonuses, and not always with good cause. I adjusted the income portion of our budget accordingly.

I have a new student to tutor online. I installed a phpBB board at my tutoring site and am using that to work with this new student. (The board is not public; one has to contact me and pay for time in order to get the link to it.) She paid for 30 minutes of my time. Yahoo!

Also adding in 32.79 to my challenge total, which includes half.com money, tutoring money and cc round ups for 2/1 - 2/8.

That brings my challenge total up to
$67.30 + $32.79= $100.09

DD and I are heading to the mall later today to pick out a birthday gift for her friend. I mentioned the earring idea to her, and she liked it, so that's what we'll look for.

I'm kind of nervous to find out about our taxes. I hope what we owe is close to what we've estimated we'll owe.

I still haven't gotten my first check yet, but I've got one of my supervisors following up on it.

Money saved today -
Carpooled
Breakfast, lunch and coffee at home
Free coffee at work

Money earned today -
3.25 hours worked

DD has a birthday party to attend this weekend. I think I'll take her to the mall to pick out a pair of earrings for her friend. The theme is a tea party, so that seems like a nice girly-girl gift.

I've been debating going to the yarn store for some double-pointed needles and sock yarn, to try and learn to work in the round with those kinds of needles. My mom made DD some leg warmers, and I'd like to try and learn to do it, too. But so far I've been talking myself out of it, at least for the time being. We'll see.

I feel like I'm in a holding pattern as far at the boutique goes. I don't need a lot of stock on hand, as it's all done online. I thought maybe I'd be ready to try and sell at a table on Earth Day (big celebration for the city DD's school is in), but to have enough stock on hand means a pretty big outlay of cash up front, and I don't know how much I'd recoup, given the event is also a fundraiser. I can't do much on the actual store look and layout until I have my new logo, and that isn't due to me until the end of the month.

Just feeling kind of blah today overall.

Today has been a great day - it's my daughter's birthday. Six years and a day ago, I was hoping she wouldn't be born for another two months, but my body had other ideas. Now she's absolutely perfect, and no one would ever guess she was a preemie.

I did some shopping for her party, and I may still need a few more things. DH volunteered to go out to Trader Joe's tonight if need be, while DD and I stay home and bake cupcakes.

I worked 2+ hours today, which is more than I was expecting. DH and I went out to lunch for a total cost of $12 for the two of us. Some friends met up with us at the restaurant - a little Mexican place - and we had a good time.

Money saved - coffee and breakfast at home
Money spent - lunch out, and shopping at Smart and Final

After adding in cc round-ups and such, my challenge total is now up to $67.30.

I need to move money between accounts less often, as it gets to be confusing remembering what I've moved and what I haven't, as well as time-consuming. I'm being very passive in the challenge, so I think I'll scale back to updating the actual ING account once a month. I can record things that happen here (sold a book, whatever), but I don't think I'll update totals any times other than when I'm adjusting the actal ING total.