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June 12, 2010, at 6:00 am If you're new to BFS, please subscribe to my RSS feed. It shows me a vote of support and keeps me motivated to keep your attention. If you have any questions or comments for me, please contact me and I'll get back to you asap. Thanks for visiting! My Favorite Posts this Week
Guest Posts on BFS
None this week, but if you would like to submit a guest post to BFS, please shoot me an idea or the actual post. I’d also appreciate a one or two sentence introduction for the piece. I’ll get back to you quickly and will give you as much advance notice as possible on its posting date.
Other Info
- PF Firewall is hosting a book giveaway, That Thing That Rich People Do. Take a look!
- Christian Common Cents is celebrating debt freedom with The I’m Debt Free Giveaway! Simply subscribe and be entered to win a copy of the book, Enjoy Your Money!: How to Make It, Save It, Invest It and Give It.
- Mike at Saving Money Today is giving away a FREE copy of the book, Enjoy Your Money! All you need to do is leave a comment on the post linked to above!
- Brad at Enemy of Debt is hosting a fund-raiser for Big Brothers Big Sisters. He’s selling the “I’m Debt Free” game and giving 100% of his commission until August 7th to Big Brothers Big Sisters!
Feel free to email me if you have any suggestions. I’d love to add a few more blogs to my regular reading list or at least give a shout-out for great posts or contests.
As always, thanks to all the bloggers that teach me something new every day. Thanks to all my commenters for making this blog the community I want it to be. Thanks to all my lurkers too. I hope everybody is enjoying this as much as I am!
June 11, 2010, at 6:00 am
When I was a kid, the coolest thing about weekends was that there might be sleepovers. I also remember that most of the best sleepovers ever included ghost stories.
There’s just something about a creepy story that made the night feel special. My heart would be racing but I’d feel like the other girls and I were now part of an elite group that would stick together when those invisible monsters attacked. In reality, we’d all be running and throwing each other back at the creature most probably, but at least we felt like a bonded clan. 
The best scary story ever as a kid was told by my friend’s dad. We were outside and all the lights were off except his flashlight. He told us a werewolf story while holding the flashlight under his chin. The scariest part was when he started making a face that really did look like he was turning into a toothy creature. All of us screamed like the little girls we were and talked about it and other spooky stories all night.
Thinking about all of this, I wonder why adults don’t continue having sleepovers? I still think it would be a ton of fun to eat junk food and hang out until the wee hours of the morning. I even have better ghost stories now then when I was a kid. It helps when you start hearing of “real” encounters that your friends have had.
For example, one of my friends was cleaning her grandfather’s house by herself a few months after he passed away. To this day, she swears that mere seconds after she finished vacuuming the living room, she turned around and saw what looked like the imprints of slippered feet pressed down into the carpet in an area that was spotless before…and she wasn’t wearing any shoes. See, creepy, right?
How about you? Any great ghost story memories? Any good stories to tell?
June 10, 2010, at 6:00 am
This article at Yahoo Finance provided by The Wall Street Journal, Yes, Everyone Really Does Hate Performance Reviews, seemed pretty one-sided to me.
The author argues that performance reviews are scheduled one-sided ways to place blame on employees and ignore their input. That kind of performance review does indeed sound useless and mean. What about performance reviews that actually review performance and open a line of communication?
Well, the author doesn’t think that those kind of reviews exist, so I’m going to have to leave the article behind.
I personally work for a company that pays way below average and doesn’t care about their “human resources” at all. BUT, they do give annual performance reviews. Depending on which supervisor an employee has, these are actual reviews that allow us to ask questions and give opinions.
My two direct supervisors are great. I seem to work in the only department within the company that treats their employees as people. My annual performance reviews are thorough and allow me to make suggestions and ask questions that I would otherwise put aside. It’s also nice to get a pat on the back from the bosses even though their normal operating procedure is that you are doing well unless told otherwise. I am the only woman in the department and I also seem to be the only one that thrives on praise.
Plus, our raises are given during performance reviews. Before this two year salary freeze, I could always depend on a little extra. Stupid economy…it is an employer’s market and they know it.
In short, I am a fan of performance reviews. Do you like your review at all? Or do you agree with the original article’s author?
June 9, 2010, at 6:00 am
Jaime at Eventual Millionaire posted her update on the goals she made for 2010 in this post. That reminded me of the goals I made at the beginning of the year.
2010 Goals
1. Eat out no more than 3 times a week.
As I mentioned in our food budget, in 2009, I was eating off of value menus every day for lunch and my husband and I ate fast food or at restaurants 3-5 evenings of the week. Since January 1, 2010, I have successfully started bringing my own lunch (have only eaten out 3 lunches all year) and we eat out about 2 times a week. It’s shaved our food budget from $600 a month to less than $400 a month.
2. Visit my remaining high school friends as I promised.
My two remaining friends from high school live 3 hours and 4 hours away from my home and I had been procrastinating on actually visiting (I dislike driving). My husband and I took off on Easter weekend Friday and visited one of my friends until Saturday and the other all day Sunday. It was great!
3. Lose 20 pounds by our annual vacation.
I am totally failing at this. Our vacation is in about a month and I’m still 30 pounds overweight. I know that I’ve lost a little weight since my pants fit better, but our scale broke, I’ve never replaced it, and I completely blew off any regular exercise routine. I lost interest in that goal and started a blog instead (which I wasn’t even thinking about in January, lol). I like my choice but hope to add weight loss into my regular routine.
4. Learn a song well enough for karaoke.
I was going to make sure to get one song down well enough that I’d be good at it if I grew a pair and got up to sing on the cruise. I haven’t, although I’m getting to know some Pink songs pretty well. I have another month, so I’ll look into this again tonight…I should be able to learn one great song in a month and half…
5. Max-out two Roth IRA’s instead of just one.
That may not happen since we replaced that goal with “pay off car by the end of the year”. If we really avoid splurging and no big emergencies pop up, we may still be able to fund a 2nd Roth IRA for 2010, but it will probably be between January-April of 2011.
Long-Term Goals
1. Start taking two vacations a year or more to make some extra fun memories as soon as I get 15 days of vacation (2011).
2. Make long-lasting close friends (other than hubby). That sounds silly, but close friends are hard to come by…finding a great friend fit seems way harder than meeting and marrying my husband!
3. Retire by age 52. So far, so good.
What are your goals? How are they coming?
June 8, 2010, at 6:00 am
How would you like to have your house remodeled for free? Whoo-hoo, right? Not so fast…
According to this article, Extreme Makeover renovations were so intense that the homeowner’s were left with way larger utility bills and property taxes than they had before. In one case, it was more than the owner’s could handle. The first “Extreme Foreclosure” of a previously renovated home has prompted the show to scale back.
How do you scale back when you’re whole show is based on amazing your viewers? They have begun renovating “smaller” homes (3000 square feet instead of 5000 plus square feet), installing low flow toilets, leaving out swimming pools some of the time, and landscaping to the home’s specific environment.
I think it’s awesome that an American TV show all about extravagance has decided that downsizing is “in”. The best part to me is that the show apparently started as an idea of helping “regular” people while entertaining an audience. It took time and a housing boom to push the renovations into the OMG category.
Maybe getting back to basics can help the owners of these renovated homes and the TV show too.
Do you watch Extreme Makeover? Have you noticed a difference?
June 7, 2010, at 10:17 pm
Thanks to a couple of people who brought it to my attention (thanks Victoria and Marti), I realized BFS’s “Subscribe by Email” wasn’t activated yet. That has been squared away. Please contact me if any of you have any further issues, thanks!
Crystal
budgetingfunstuff *at* gmail *dot* com
June 7, 2010, at 6:00 am
In March, Ninja at Punch Debt in the Face wrote a letter to himself 10 years later and challenged others to do the same. I came across one of those letters in late March at Fiscal Geek and another mid-April at 151 Days Off. The letters were amazing and made me want to participate. Here’s what I’d write to my 37 year old self:
Dear Red,
You’ve been with hubby for 19 years now…are we happily celebrating our 15th anniversary? Do you still snuggle in the mornings before work or give each other head massages when you’re stressed? Do you still make each other laugh? Does he still refuse to let you cook the main meals because he “fears death”, oh, and does he still over-compliment your sandwiches in an attempt to get you to make them instead? Most importantly, are you two still in love?
If you answered no to any of these, you should work on that. Laugh more. Loosen up. Unless of course he did something supremely crappy. Then you should…never mind…leave no proof.
So, did we change our minds on the kid front? If we didn’t, do we have more dogs? If we did, I hope he or she is healthy and not a pain-in-the-butt like you were. I would hate for Mom to have been right. You know any kid you have is going to be a smart-a$$, right? I wouldn’t have it any other way. Is hubby a great dad? I bet he surprised himself.
How is our money looking? Did BFS take off? Is the house paid off as planned? Did hubby talk you into trading up yet? I hope not. Stick to your guns and keep his mind off it. You know how…buy him some board games or something. (Haha, you didn’t think that was what I was going to say).
Anyway, are we still on track to retire in 15 more years? If not, why? I don’t want to work into our 60′s, do you?
Are you still a nice person? Have you made someone random smile today? I hope we still have a good sense of humor. I also hope we still help others. If you haven’t volunteered for a while, schedule that for this weekend. You know you want to and there are a ton of places that appreciate our time.
Okay, please make sure that you make the rest of our life fun. Love hubby some more, you know he’s crazy about you. Make a silly joke or use that kid voice we always fall into. If you haven’t been silly lately, man up and try it out. You know we love to laugh.
Sincerely,
Red at 27…the one who hopes we had a great 10 years…
That was fun. Do any of you have any comments or questions for your future selves?
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DISCLAIMER I am not a professional or a financial advisor. BFS posts are informational opinions only. Please make your own financial decisions based on personal research or see a financial advisor.
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