The Dollar Double Cheeseburger is Ending
This is the last week that the double cheeseburger will be on McDonald’s menu. The price will be going up to $1.19. They will be coming out with a new $1 sandwich called the McDouble. It is basically a double cheeseburger but with only one slice of cheese.
The double cheeseburger was a favorite of mine and it probably contributed to much of my weight gain. I think I’ll be passing it up now for the McDouble though when I’m buying food at McDonalds. And that probably won’t be very often. Since I get a free McDonald’s meal every week I do not plan on going there other than for my free meal.
A dollar double cheeseburger was a frugal choice for eating out. When you consider that you could eat cheaper and healthier at home though it probably wasn’t a very good choice.
Surviving Christmas
Christmas is not my favorite time of the year. Last year I wrote about how I had managed to mostly opt out of Christmas. I am not going to be so lucky this year. With the addition of a GF this year I’ve also picked up several more Christmas obligations. We will be attending four different family Christmas gatherings. My GF will be doing all the additional Christmas buying (except for my gift for her of course) so I don’t have much more obligation in that sense. I’d still rather receive no gifts and give no gifts but in order to stay sociable with family and friends I have to participate in Christmas at least on a minimal level.
Goals Review and December Goals
At the beginning of this year I made three goals for this year. They were to incur no new debt(other than student loans), improve my blogs, and to lose twenty pounds. The year isn’t over but I’m going to wrap up these goals now. The first goal was easily met and I don’t plan on incurring any new debt ever again. The second goal was also met. This goal is somewhat subjective but I have increased my readership on this blog from under 100 readers to occasionally over 300 readers. I’ve also increased my online income overall by an even bigger percentage. I feel it is fair to say that I’ve improved my blogs. The third goal will not be met. In fact I will most likely end up with negative progress on this one. With the holidays coming up I will likely gain weight rather than lose it. This goal will be revisited next year with a specific plan for losing weight.
I’ll be out of school for most of December so that is a great time to get stuff done. I’ll be setting a couple of goals for myself and hope to get more done than that. My first goal is to write an article a day for either Associated Content or eHow. That should give me a good idea of how much time I should spend writing for these sites in the future. My other goal is to build two static websites. I’ve had the ideas and the domain names for these websites for several months now but haven’t gotten around to building them. I don’t have time to start another blog but I’m hoping that once these sites are up they will produce a little income and rarely need to be updated. I’ll probably add to these goals before the month is over but I need to do these at the very least.
FBN Roundup- Half Marathon Edition
I ran a half marathon yesterday. My original plan was to run a full marathon in October but a lack of training made that unlikely. I scheduled the half marathon this month instead. I still didn’t do very much training but it was enough to finish although at a very slow pace. Here are some of my favorite posts from the Frugal Blog Network and beyond this week.
Almost Frugal gives us childproofing your house – the frugal way. I don’t think I’ll ever need to do this but these sound like some good tips.
Frugal Babe refinished a coffee table. This is an interesting coffee table. I wonder how much it cost to make it.
Frugal Zeitgeist talks about frugality and simple living. This is an explanation of what frugal means to her.
Not Made of Money shares five personal finance gifts for under $25. These gifts will continue to give.
The Frugal Duchess gives us some ways to winterize your home. She probably doesn’t need to winterize her home too much since she lives in Miami. This is solid advice though.
And from beyond the FBN I also liked Not the sort of person who… from Wisebread. This is a great examination of why people choose not to adapt certain frugal behaviors.
Free Dr Pepper
Earlier this year Dr Pepper* said that if Guns N’ Roses actually released “Chinese Democracy” this year they would give a free soda to everyone in America. Since that has happened they will have coupons for a free 20-ounce soda available for 24 hours on the Dr Pepper Web site beginning Sunday at 12:01 a.m. The coupons will be good until February 28,2009.
Dr Pepper is my favorite soda and one of my biggest vices so I’ll be taking advantage of this coupon. I know I should cut back or cut out my soda consumption. Dr Pepper provides me more enjoyment for the money though than just about anything so it is a great value. At least it will be until I get diabetes.
*Note that there is no period after the Dr in Dr Pepper. Many writers mistakenly place a period there.
Keeping Urges From Becoming Splurges
My method to keep urges from becoming splurges is to give in to my urge but in a controlled manner. This makes my urge go away but doesn’t have the same negative consequences as a full-blown splurge.
Here is a recent example. I’ve been a little depressed lately and being depressed makes me want to gamble. This doesn’t make much sense because I lose money when I gamble which makes me even more depressed. Irrational as it is, the urge to gamble exists and has to be dealt with. My solution was to take $100 to the casino and gamble it away.
It does suck to waste $100 like that but I know if I ignore my urge I’ll eventually give in and go on an unplanned bingge - which would likely cost me much more than $100. After losing the $100 my urge to gamble was gone and my mood has gradually started to improve.
This method has worked for me for years. After going backwards the past couple of years the time between giving in to my gambling urge is gradually increasing again. This is probably because now that I’m with my GF I’m much less prone to depression. If you want to try a variation of this method for your own urge please note that it only works if you know that you will only give in to the urge as planned.
Search and Win Gift Card with Swag Bucks
Swag Bucks is an online portal dedicated to helping you earn digital dollars called “Swag Bucks”, which can be redeemed for exclusive swagbucks.com merchandise. There is a variety of merchandise but gift cards are what I’m most likely to use my Swag Bucks for. You can get a $5 Amazon.com gift card for 45 Swag Bucks which seems to be one of the better deals. It takes a different number of Swag Bucks to earn a same denomination gift card depending on the retailer.
This is somewhat similar to the Moola.com search and win that I used to participate in before they ended it. The Moola deal was good while it lasted and I’ve made a couple bucks this month from my referrals participating in the deals they still have. I’ve just started Swag Bucks and I’m hoping it will work at least as well as Moola for me. It does have the recommendation of other bloggers I read.
The best way to benefit from a program like this is to have referrals because you also earn points when your referrals earn points. If you would like to give this a try just sign up using my Swag Bucks referral link.
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FBN Roundup- One Week Left Edition
I only have one week left of classes for the semester. I am so ready for law school to be over. Here are some of my favorite posts from the Frugal Blog Network and beyond this week.
Almost Frugal has a post about losing weight as a money saver. Saving money should give me incentive to lose weight but apparently it is not enough.
Frugal Babe shares her holiday gift-giving plans. I keep my gift-giving as simple as possible.
Frugal Zeitgeist shares a frugal online shopping tip. If you combine the discount codes with shopping through a cash-back site you can save even more money.
Not Made of Money explains how to deal with financial stress in your life. Good advice here.
The Frugal Duchess continues her online book tour. If you haven’t checked out her book yet I highly recommend that you do.
The Carnival of Personal Finance was hosted at The Digerati Life this week. It included my post about my identity theft experience.
There were plenty of other posts I found especially interesting this week but as usual I forgot to bookmark them and I know can’t remember them. Oh well, maybe next week I’ll remember.
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Finding Affordable Health Insurance
One of the challenges of retiring early or being self-employed is finding affordable health insurance. I’m very frugal and don’t spend a lot of money but I wouldn’t go without health insurance to save money. The risk is too great.
I currently have private health insurance and pay a little less than $70 a month. This is a good deal for someone who is 41 years old and overweight. It is quite a bit cheaper than my student health plan and it provides more coverage. The deductible is $5000 but I’m not too concerned about that since I rarely visit a doctor. If I do need to visit a doctor I can visit the student health clinic for free. The purpose of health insurance for me is to keep me from being wiped out financially if I suffer a serious injury or illness.
My insurance is cheap but as I grow older I’ll need to find more ways to keep the cost down. One option is to raise my deductible to $10,000 but I’m not going to do that until I have more savings. I could also open a Health Savings Account or possibly deduct some of the health insurance cost as business expense. I need to do more research on these. Right now I probably won’t owe taxes anyway so a Health Savings Account is of no benefit to me.
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November Income Challenge Update
My goal for November was to do something every day to make extra money. I’ve already fallen behind but if I do two or three things some days I’ll be able to make an average of one a day. Here are some things I’ve done so far to make extra money:
- Opened checking account for Bank Bonus
- Online Survey
- Associated Content article
- Brokered ING Direct links
- Added Adsense back to this site
- Medical Study
- Opened bank cd
- Invested in stock
Some of these things will be done on multiple days. I won’t be doing thirty different things to make extra money. The rest of the month I’ll be concentrating on writing articles for Associated Content and eHow. It would be nice if I could estabish these as recurring sources of extra income.
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