Money

Seems an appropriate topic given it's tax day, as I know since I have my official US Holiday calendar marked to display in my newly created Google calendar. Sweet!

We saw "Friends With Money" this afternoon. It was a slice-of-life type movie. Nothing really happened, but I liked it nonetheless. Francis McDormand was the character who most closely resembled me and this was hard to take at times. D looked at me during one particular moment and just laughed because she said something that could very well have come out of my mouth: at one point, when she's explaining why she hasn't shampooed her hair in a very long time she says, "It makes my arms tired." Yes, this is an excuse I would use to get out of doing something I didn't enjoy doing.

Speaking of money, we're doing good on our budget so far this month. There are 50% of the days left this month and we have 68% of our budget remaining. That's with going over our dog budget by 76% (and that will get even higher next week with Turtle's second vet appointment this month). We're also over on charity, but that's OK because we'll just donate less next month.

During this tracking process, I've been actually logging in to our credit card account regularly and viewing the purchases so I can track and categorize them to make sure we're doing OK against budget (we charge everything, so it's easy that way). So on Wednesday or Thursday I see a charge to ProFlowers, which is where D always gets my flowers from. I figure, oops, won't be a surprise, and wait patiently for them to arrive. They didn't arrive today so I finally said. "Where are my flowers?" Turns out his assistant's aunt (to whom she was very close) died and she got the darn flowers. Geez!

In other money related lessons, I also just learned was that people who carry a balance month-to-month on a credit card pay interest from the moment they pay for something. I didn't know this because I have always paid my credit balances in full each month and we never pay any interest, so I assumed that people didn't have to pay any interest until those items were not paid off entirely on their next payment. Credit card companies are evil. That's why more people have to learn to take advantage of them and use them to get free money for 30 days AND accumulate points.