Two Days

Just today and tomorrow and I'll get my first day off in over a month! Tonight though I'm scheduled to go to work right after I leave work. I'm taking my clothes with me to change after I clock out.

The upside is that I don't have to work until eleven! I'm actually kind of happy about that and the fact that I get another payday in a week!

THAT I'm very excited about! Anyway it's getting easier but last night sucked. Two days before food stamp day they decided to change the entire section I work in around. I spent all night trying to figure out this telxon price gun thing and getting the portable printer to work right. Of course I had no training on important things like that. Not to mention my scheduled coworker called in and was a no show, so it was just me with a huge mess to figure out and no training to do it with.

I DID figure it out though! I kept messing with the options, printing test labels, and finally got it all to work! That was a system that was seemingly more complicated than the Apollo missions but it attaches to your wrist and with no help or instructions I did it!

Chalk one up for the old brain rolling around in my head!

Eye on the prize!

One More Day

Last night at work went well enough. It was a busy night and flew by. The Date cooked a great supper for me when I got home as well! Chicken fried chicken and fried potatoes! She pickled the peppers from the garden and in a couple of weeks we'll use them in an Italian beef dish!

All in all things have gone well. Nothing pressing has gotten us down really. Everything is flying by on schedule. Today is payday and it'll take care of one bill and groceries. Next payday, next Friday will be the big payday that will clear up the big bills and take care of at least one small bill altogether according to the budget! That's an exciting day to look forward to!

Eye on the prize!

Ben Hur

Last night I made some decent chili for supper. The only thing that was missing was the twenty degree weather to make it really good chili.

Thing 2 said when it gets cold we needed to make a big pot of chili and go outside Beersnob style and light the ball o' fire and a lot of friends and eat it with hot coffee. She actually said that.

I had everything ready to pickle the banana peppers but Thing 2 and I started watching the epic Ben Hur and really that made for a great night with me and her. The only movie I consider on the same level with Ben Hur as far as the epic scale of it and the era of Hollywood from which it was produced is The Ten Commandments. I even place that movie a slight bit more epic even. It was more groundbreaking in terms of scale, special effects, and the actors are more widely known and were mainstream at the time.

Heston, Brynner, Baxter, Edward G. Robinson, DeCarlo, Vincent Price, and more! Directed by DeMille! That's EPIC and why I give it the slight nod over Ben Hur in a close tie. The peppers will get pickled though, we didn't get the garden going to just waste the products it made.

It was a fine evening though and my last evening off this week. I believe I work four straight days now and get Sunday and Monday off. That will make Sunday my first day off from both jobs since August 28th. I hadn't considered that before but wow! That'll be a good day! Tomorrow is payday and we'll put money into our grocery envelope and pay a bill. We are under our grocery budget this week so it'll be adding up now!

Eye on the prize!

Last Evening Off

We are making chili tonight and I plan on pickling the banana peppers from the garden! The sweet potatoes are just about ready to pick as well so the harvest is coming in. The tomatillos are there but tiny.

The tomatoes didn't do well at all. Too hot and they burned midseason. Next year we are going to grow more conventional crops like onions, beans, potatoes, a different variety of tomatoes. Garlic, which will be planted very shortly, and stuff we use in cooking weekly.

We started the garden too late in the growing season for those crops and it was already too hot by the time the gardens were built.

It's ok though, they are established now, the soil is in great shape. We'll be ready on the first day of planting season to get it all in the ground!

Airplane Revisited

Classics are classics for a reason. Not only do they stand the test of time but sometimes they can surpass your expectations when you revisit them again.

Airplane is one of those movies. It's a movie I saw in the theaters when I was a kid. I walked to the Esquire Theater when this disaster movie spoof came out. Actually this was the grandaddy of all spoofs when it hit the screens.

What followed since Airplane has been the Police Squad movies, Scary Movie movies, and many many more I don't want to list. I remember laughing very hard as a kid and I laughed a lot last night when I played this on Netflix streaming. Yeah I was way too young for most of the jokes but that's ok too.

It's just that good! I'm glad I revisited this old classic last night. What a spectacular time capsule movie! Give it a watch again sometime and you might agree!

Beautiful Morning!

This morning is what I want in a fall day! Mid sixties, calm, sunny. Good grief if there is any proof of God in the universe days like today have to be in the top five! Hard to be an atheist on days like today!

I work from one thirty to six today. It'll be a snap. Yesterday most everything was stocked and finished by the time I even got to work. They had a full crew in the early mornings and they got it all in great shape and then when I got there I just had to restock once in a while. Did some straightening up of some fruit and vegetables and such.

That's what comprised my day! Today will be similar to yesterday except I'll have some help for my whole shift. I had help for the first half of my shift yesterday and then I had a guy with me who is a bit slow. Not mentally slow just doesn't want to do a whole lot. He is what he is and for what they pay that's what they'll continue to get. People who will make a career out of that job or people who are passing through such as myself. They'll have to take the good and the bad and weed them out when they get the chance.

I made some stir fry rice when I got home and didn't do much at all after that. Thing 2 wasn't feeling well so she went to bed around six and I didn't see her the rest of the evening.

I just took her to work a bit ago and I'm less than two hours from going to work myself now. I am making a gumbo for supper tonight! I picked up some tiny shrimp and smoked sausage yesterday after work. Going to put some crushed tomatoes, okra, sausage, seasonings, and a flour and oil base in the crock pot before work and let it simmer while I'm at work. By the time I get off work it'll be ready for the shrimp and then we'll make the rice to serve it over. Easy as can be!

Eye on the prize!

Last Show

Today is my baby's last show for Dixie Swim Club. It's a special arranged show for a bus of tourists. If it is a success, which I know it will be as this is a great show, then it can signal more business for the theatre! That's always a great thing!

Sadly though I won't be as involved with one of my favorite past times as I have been in the past. I will be though once things are squared away, and I'll be able to keep to the schedule I used to keep with them. Two or three shows a season, a helping hand here and there, and a few workdays for that extra bit of help!

Yesterday I took off of work early. I came home to change the brake pads of The Date's car and decided I'd do the same on the Tahoe. It ran us over our budget a bit but they were needed on both vehicles. I literally had The Date's car finished in under a half hour. It took longer to take the wheel off than it did to change the brake pads, easy work.

The Tahoe though was a nightmare. I couldn't break loose the lug nuts on one side. Unusual that they were so tight. So I took it to a tire shop and had them break them loose and re-tighten them for the drive home. Then the caliper had star head bolts that looked like allen head bolts. One broke loose easily but the other was another nightmare. I nearly stripped it out in the effort before a buddy called me. He thought it would be easier with another head drive.

So he headed over an hour before I left for work at Walmart. The tough side took fifteen minutes before we got the pads changed. The second side took less than five minutes from tire off to pads on and back on the ground again! I made it to work easily in time!

So it was sort of a day off but I did work at home and at Walmart. Not to mention the three hours I did spend at work buttoning things up for the weekend and preparing for next week.

Bill Count

We started with twenty two bills total. The first week we paid off five. We acquired two more bills and today we are paying off three more. That brings the total to eight bills paid off in the first month. However since we did acquire two more bills we will have seventeen left now.

We were very happy to have gone over the math last night after I got off work! It was very exciting to see the math on paper right there in front of us and plan our budget until Thursday! To me it showed actual progress and why I am working two jobs.

We plan on getting at least another ten bills paid off very soon, some are as higher amounts while others are around a hundred dollars, some lower. It's the effect though that keeps me going.

Once we get everything out of the way but the Tahoe and Caliber we will be in such great shape! After they are finished we'll be in tremendous shape and paying down the mortgage! That's the big one, a paid off mortgage is worth more peace of mind than anything I can think of!

The snowball is rolling and gaining speed!

Eye on the prize!

Rainy Night

On my way home after eleven last night I was watching the sky dance and crackle with lightning. What an amazing sight after the summer we've all endured! Yes we've had some rain but there's something different about rain in the middle of the night.

It seems to make you sleep better and deeper. Not sure what makes rain so conducive to great sleep but it works and I feel better this morning even though I've had less actual sleep than the night before!

Work was ok yesterday. I was by myself during the day at my main job. It was busy but no overly so. Work last night was ok as well, most everything was filled up by the time I got to work. There wasn't a lot to do but we did it anyway. The night did drag by time wise but that's what happens when there isn't a ton of work.

It's ok though, it'll be so worth it in a few months! I'll be glad it's over with but I'll be glad I did it too! A guy at work decided he was going to max out his PTO leave. To do that you have to come to work every day for a full year. Every optional day you have to come to work, every snow day you have to come to work, every single day. For a year. After it's over with though you've got nearly three hundred hours of leave built up though. It'll last you a long time once you've gone through that and you'll likely never be out of leave again unless you have some medical emergency and even that you'll be on short term disability and only lose two and a half hours a day.

That's the same thing with me. Once we've been Ramsey'ed and our bills are finished it'll be over! One tough stretch of time and it's done for good! You've set yourself and family up for a lifetime of responsible finances.

Eye on the prize!

Downsized

I watched a tiny bit of this show last night. I guess the premise is that this family has fallen on hard times and are trying to get their way out of it. What I found ironic is that if they had a plan like I'm (and many millions of Americans who have found out that being debt free and on a cash basis is the way to freedom) working on they wouldn't be in the situation they are in.

They waited until it was too late though. They got caught thinking the jobs they had were forever, they got caught getting comfortable in their lifestyle which isn't bad but you can't owe the kind of money they owed and be comfortable. Think about it for a bit, the unemployment rate is hovering around 9%. That's nearly one in every ten Americans out of work.

How safe is your job? I survived two layoffs in my own job over the years. They cut right up to me twice! Now I have seniority over a couple of people again but some of the older ones have left and they never replaced them. I'm fairly safe but it's taken nearly twenty years to get there.

Examine your job, see how stable it really is. Put a plan in place to keep you safe if anything did go wrong with your job. I don't want my family to suffer if something goes wrong with my job. I want everything to be safe for a few months while I find something else to do should things go bad. Security is why I'm doing this, what kind of security do you have?

Quiet Night Off

The Date and Mom took Thing 2 to have a root canal done in a nearby town. I got home and made some enchiladas for supper. They were nearly finished when the family arrived back home safely. Thing 2 curled up in our bed and slept the evening away while I watched Columbo and The Date talked to Crime Reporter on the phone:)

All in all it was a typical American evening at home. I will figure out something different for this evening as I've nearly exhausted the amount of Columbo episodes on Netflix. After this evening I'll have five days in a row to work and I'll get next Monday and Tuesday evening off as well!

I hope my readers will figure out in my own small way that I'm being very public about my second job experiences in order to at least inspire those of you on the fence about getting your debt paid off and following the Dave Ramsey plan or at least a portion of it. If it motivates you then I hope you follow through with a plan of your own making if nothing else.

It's not a sugar coated account of getting a second job either, I've been very upfront with the bad as well as the good. As Dave Ramsey says, "You have to live like no one else" (meaning you have to buckle down and take the first step in the process. The Date and I put all of our bills in front of us and we decided together that we were going to do this. She doesn't want me working two jobs anymore than I want to work two jobs but that's the way out of this right now and the way into a better house in a better neighborhood.) "so later you can live like no one else!"

The rest of the sentence is the icing on a tough cake to bake. It's the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and it's really there! It's of your own making, your own labor will produce that pot of gold. If there is two of you in a household get on the same page first of all about committing to this. Second figure up your bills from smallest to largest, and put the calculator, pen, and paper to use and see how long it would take to snowball your way to that pot of gold.

Then figure out your income and how you can add to it to make the snowball really rock down that hill of debt! If we can do this then I know you can and if you have two full time incomes then you can do this much faster than we can! I know you can! This Friday we'll pay off at least one more bill bringing the total to six I believe! In three weeks we've knocked out six bills, six bills that will never bother us again!

What can you do?

Eye on the prize!

Johnny Cash The Killer

Changing up the tempo of the blog today to talk about a TV episode I saw the other night on Netflix streaming. I do enjoy Columbo quite a bit. You see who the killer is at the start of the episode, you see their ingenious plot to pull off the perfect murder, and then you see the seemingly bumbling yet disarmingly brilliant Lt. Columbo solve the case with lots of brilliant questioning.

Lots of times at the end you see the killer catch themselves in a trap that Lt. Columbo has laid for them. They usually go quietly and are relieved that they have been captured by such a mild mannered man.

The show ran as part of the NBC Mystery Movie weekly show in the seventies. You'll likely recall the whistling theme if not then it's on You Tube and it'd bring back memories:) Columbo shared the spot with McCloud and McMillan and Wife and after a while ran an hour and a half long. Unusual for a weekly show to run ninety minutes and unheard of today.

One of the few episodes I watched the other evening was with guest star Johnny Cash as he played a gospel singer who was parolled from an Arkansas prison and was being blackmailed and used by his wife to earn her lots of money for a tabernacle. He constructed an elaborate plot to get rid of her and the blackmail material and then Lt. Columbo was on the case and yes he caught him, yes Cash confessed and was relieved at the end, and yes it was a very good episode.

I do wish that Netflix would add the rest of the show to the streaming side as right now there are only forty odd episodes available. To contrast that the entire Rockford Files and Hawaii 5-0 is available as well as Magnum P.I.

When I have the spare time recently (which isn't a lot) I've been unwinding with a seventies or eighties mystery show. They are really quite the time capsule stored in my forgotten memory and make for a great diversion! I just wish Netflix would up their streaming library a bit more so I can get more Columbo without getting the DVD sent to us via snailmail.

The job went well enough yesterday, I was left with about six hundred pounds of rotten fruits and vegetables to be dumped though and it took me about forty five minutes to accomplish that. Not bad overall but I wound up with mushed up rotten peaches on my shirt which I did my best to clean off when I finished. The thought occurred to me then, this will be worth it though.

That's quite the attitude to have when you can really believe in your heart that what you are going through right now will be worth it in less than two years. No I don't believe the job will last two years at all, far from it actually but it'll last long enough to get a lot of this cleared up via Dave Ramsey's program!

Eye on the prize!

Sunday Sunday

Working four and a half hours today. That's what I worked yesterday as well. I forgot my schedule is now adjusted to the hours I originally wanted, roughly twenty hours a week instead of thirty. Now it appears that I'll be working roughly forty five hours every pay period instead of sixty.

It doesn't seem like much but believe me it is. It takes a toll on you after a while. This schedule is lighter by a few hours but I won't be rushing around after work to get back to work now.

It'll be a boost to my energy level and a bit off of my shoulders to carry.

Yesterday went well, it was nice to come into work and work before most other shifts were finished. That means that you actually get less of the junk work like carrying out the rotten veggies and fruits and more of the easier work such as stocking them. Tedious yes but it's money and it's a means to the end.

Eye on the prize!

Paydays Rock

We just figured our budget, we have leftover money! Groceries are bought, full tanks of gas, and payday is seven days away again! This week The Date and I both got paid, next week I'll get my paycheck and all is right with the world!

Leftover money from the budget! How cool is that?!

More than likely we'll hang onto the leftover until next payday and put it all onto paying off another bill, I'm pretty excited to see what bites the dust next!

I work from noon to six today and tomorrow, I get Monday and Tuesday off though in the evenings! This is working so well right now that I'm starting to look forward to going to work, how strange is that?!

More Serious

We don't know 100% as of yet but Ramfan and I believe that the pc died of a motherboard failure. It makes sense and that's what the diagnosis signs point to. No matter, we have a laptop to work on in the mean time.

I'll be looking for a barebones system that I'll have to assemble and I'll build our next system when the budget allows. It'll be a nice challenge and it won't take long to get things going again, perhaps a few weeks to a couple of months.

My evening off was very nice. I enjoyed doing very little but watching The Night Stalker and Columbo on streaming Netflix. I work tonight and the weekend before having two evenings off in a row in Monday and Tuesday!

It's getting easier!

Eye on the prize!

PC Problems

I arrived home from work yesterday, the main job, to see the family pc locked up and dead acting. I rebooted it to no avail. I believe the hard drive locked up and failed. I'll ask my friend today what he thinks as a second opinion.

I'll do a proper diagnosis tonight when I get home again. I'm off this evening and I'm very happy about that!

Easier

Last night was easier although it was a long and busy night. The second job will start paying off tomorrow as it's my first payday. I work tonight and get Thursday night off leaving me Friday night to work.

They fired one guy who had attendance problems, he didn't like working there anyway. I don't see why he had a problem with it. He acted like it was the hardest thing in the world. Go find another job where everyone pretty much leaves you alone. In this economy yeah, go find another job and see where you wind up with no skills and whatever experience you have from working at Walmart.

If he thought he hated working there he'll really hate working for a place that micromanages you and is on your tail every second of your shift. It's really getting easier for me. I don't dread getting out of the Tahoe anymore to go clock in anymore. Yeah it's hard getting off of one shift and going home to change clothes only to go work another five and a half hours.

It'll be worth it though. What's a few months of harder labor compared to a lifetime of financial security. When you've got your EVERYTHING paid off and a savings account on hand to use if you need it. When the money you earn is going into your pocket instead of creditors and when you have a special feeling when you go to sleep. It's the same feeling we dream of having that drives us to play the lottery on occasion.

The odds are better with a part time job though. I mean unless you know someone who's been attacked by a shark, after they've been struck by lightning, two times....while on a road trip to Idaho.

Tomorrow is bill paying day. The Date and I get to decide on who gets paid next, write the checks and get them gone! That's an exciting day now! I used to dread paydays...in fact the payday before this last one where we started our snowball I dreaded. I hate being paid and being broke five minutes later after you pay your bills online. It's not a good feeling.

I imagine that's what the miners of old felt after they were issued company coin for pay and it was only good at the company store. That's a similar form of what we have with today's credit card system except it's voluntary and you don't have to work in a coal mine to get into trouble.

So tomorrow is payday, at least one more bill will be paid off completely making the total six paid off out of seventeen I believe which includes the mortgage and two cars. If it's more I'll make sure to blog about it for those of you who are keeping track of our progress:)

The Decision

The Date and I have decided to take Dave Ramsey's Baby Step program and alter it a little bit. Since I'm working a second job I'd like to be in the position to quit it sooner than the step program would allow. Meaning in step three the idea is to build a three to six month emergency fund. Step four is putting your retirement into place. Step five is to fund college and step six is to pay off the house.

I want to include the house into step two which is the debt snowball. Since we really don't have a lot of consumer debt, credit cards, and such things our biggest bills would be the vehicles and mortgage.

Step four is completed for me. I have a 401k and a pension plan. I'm kicking in 8% right now to the 401k and on October 1st I'll be putting in 10% and work it up to the required 15% automatically. It's got years to grow so it'll do fine and nicely supplement the pension plan.

Since I'm already working two jobs and the second job is getting easier I like the idea of swapping steps six and three, although step three is very important and vital to the overall financial health of a family. I want the house paid for sooner and with step four already in place I feel comfortable with it. The debt snowball will include the mortgage and it'll be paid down substantially or off completely before moving on.

It's a bit late to fully fund a college fund for The Things as one of them will be going off to college in less than two years, The Date is already in college, and Thing 2 is a freshman in high school. That step is not irrelevant but by the time they go to college we will have everything including the mortgage paid off and possibly have a new mortgage by that point. The Date will likely have a full time job and we'll be in the position to financially help both Things.

As I've said earlier and I've been reading a lot of accounts that a lot of step twos have over fifty thousand in debt to pay off before proceeding to step three. We don't have that. To me and our situation (and to allow me to quit the second job faster) it makes sense to include the mortgage in the snowball. It'll open up more of my income to going to the other things we want to accomplish, it'll allow the second job to go away at will, and it'll put us into the housing market to find a bigger house and have a substantial down payment on the next house.

That's the decision!

Eye on the prize!

Monday Monday

Not much in the mood to write this morning but I'll soldier on. Work was funny yesterday, they had three people including myself scheduled and then after I went home at six they had no one. Ouch.

I'm not sure how that played out but I'm positive that it wasn't good.

I did my shift, things went well but got very busy. It's the way it is for now. The Date worked up our minimum budget that will be our baseline plan. It'll be what we go by as it's the most realistic, we'll be saving a ton of interest and years off of our cars and especially house payment.

Best of all we'll be in a fabulous position to purchase any reasonable house we will want in just a couple of years instead of the better part of a decade. That keeps me motivated to stick it out with a part time job until I can't stand it any longer. I can do that as long as we are making progress like we currently are.

We're making great strides to start with as a lot of the smaller medical bills are either paid for or will be this week as The Date and I both get paid. I got my paystub online and it's more net than I expected it would be. Thus it'll be a bigger help than I expected it would be and go further:)

Honestly I didn't figure it would add up as fast as it would but it did, I was genuinely surprised at the total that fifty nine hours paid me, it's not a lot but when you've got a real job to go to every day fifty nine hours is a lot. As I said though it's ok as we are making a lot of progress right now:)

The Day

I was at work when it happened. We had heard that a plane had hit the WTC and it sounded like an accident. We pulled up the news website and saw the first pictures. It was bad.

Then we heard heard about the other three planes that were hijacked. Then the whole world changed forever as we came to the realization that we were under attack. We had been punched a few other times and didn't do much to retaliate such as the WTC bombing, the African embassy bombings, even the USS Cole. Now they really wanted our attention and got the world's attention in the process.

We went to one of the shops that had a TV, the second plane had hit the WTC and then it fell. It came crashing down to the ground and everyone was speechless at this horror, this real life horror and nothing was funny anymore. We lost our collective voices and the nation's tears flowed.

The Palestinians danced in the streets in celebration at this tragedy and we stood silent. The world learned the name Osama Bin Laden and then the world changed again as we became the hunters.

After a manhunt that lasted the better part of a decade we found him and we killed him. We destroyed the greatest part of the Al Qaeda network and neutralized a large part of the Taliban.

Today we are still fighting and we are still learning and we are still vigilant. We have not forgotten.

God help us and God bless us.