My Biggest Freebie Yet

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As part of their grand re-opening a local McDonald’s had a promotion giving one year of free extra value meals to the first 100 walk-in customers and first 100 drive-thru customers.  They re-opening was scheduled for 5 am and the restaurant is located just a little off my usual route home from my route home so I decided to stop by and see what the line looked like.  I got off work at 4:15 am and arrived at the restaurant at 4:30 am.  There were only 3 people in line.  This was a lot fewer than I expected.  Since there was no worry of not being in the first 100 I left to gas up my car and came back.

I was the 5th person in line when I came back.  There were no problems with getting my free coupons when they opened up.  They are good for one free extra value meal a week for a year.  The line was short enough that I thought about getting in the drive-thru line and getting another set of coupons.  I decided that one free Mcdonald’s meal a week was enough though. I think this is my best freebie yet.  For a half hour of my time and driving a couple miles out of the way I am receiving about $250 worth of free food.  I know that McD’s food is bad for me but since I’m eating it anyway it might as well be free.

The 25th Carnival of Money Stories

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Welcome to the 25th Carnival of Money Stories and Tight Fisted Miser.
You can check out past Carnivals and learn more about the Carnival of Money Stories at their homepage. If your submission isn’t included it is probably because it wasn’t a personal story about money.
Spending/Saving

Eric presents The Cheap Lunch Wins Out posted at A Penny Closer.

Super Saver presents Wood Deck Maintenance – A Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Project posted at My Wealth Builder.

FIRE Finance presents Garage Sale Tips – A Complete Kit To Save Money! posted at FIRE Finance.

Financial Philosophies and Observations

glblguy presents Does Good Customer Service Still Exist? posted at Gather Little By Little.

Kay Bell presents Bank error not in my favor posted at Don’t Mess With Taxes.

Brip Blap presents find a nickel, pick it up posted at brip blap.

Millionaire Mommy Next Door presents The Powerful (and Addictive) Nature of Giving posted at Millionaire Mommy Next Door.

Amanda presents Observations on Las Vegas… posted at Young and Broke.

The Dough Roller presents Five Guys and the Art of a Great Burger posted at The Dough Roller.

Investing/Earning

Logan Flatt, CFA presents How to Get Ahead In America (1st of a 12-Part Series) posted at PowerWealth.com.

Amanda presents How I made $1592.53 in 1 month by blogging posted at the so called me.

Money for Military presents First Spouse Gold Coins Investment posted at Money for Military.

Financial Planning/Lessons

edithyeung presents The Money Series – You Are Not Going to Live Forever posted at Edith Yeung.Com: Dream. Think. Act..

Meredith H. Kaiser presents Financial (and Life) Lessons I Learned as a Kid posted at Saving Advice Blog.

Silicon Valley Blogger presents 10 Tips On Life and Disability Insurance: How And Why We’re Getting More posted at The Digerati Life.

Steve Leung presents Making an Offer on a Home: Behind the Scenes posted at Silicon Valley Real Estate Blog – 1SiliconValley.com.

FMF presents Money Saving Tip: Shop Now for Holiday Gifts posted at Free Money Finance.

Lynnae presents Why I blog about being frugal posted at beingfrugal.net.

paidtwice presents Eliminating Fees – Don’t incur them to begin with! posted at I’ve Paid For This Twice Already….

After reading the Carnival posts feel free to stick around and read through my archives. If you like what you read you can subscribe by clicking on the link below this post or on the feed button in the header. If you have a personal finance blog and would like to exchange links please contact me.

The next Carnival of Money Stories is being hosted by Paid Twice and you can submit your own money experience here.

This is a Top 100 Personal Finance Blog?

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According to this post at FIRE Finance listing the top 100 personal finance blogs this blog is in the top 100.   These lists are somewhat inaccurate but they are still interesting.  He compiled three different lists using different data sources to make it a little easier to compare sites.  It isn’t really possible to make a definitive list of the top personal finance sites do to insufficient data and discrepancies in the information available but it was a good effort and I’m sure it succeeded in bringing his blog a lot of traffic.  What I found most interesting was that according to Quantcast data my readership is primarily female,  18-34 crowd.  Maybe I should use this blog to get dates.

August Expenses

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Here is a breakdown of my expenses for August.

Household

$516.70

Food

$101.75

Transportation

$201.3

Entertainment

$7.30

Debt

$620

Total

$1447.05

I’m very pleased with my expense results for August.  If you take out the amount for debt repayment my expenses were well under 50% of my income. This is the kind of month I’ve been wanting to have since I started tracking my expenses.  There were no unusual expenses this month such as car repair or dental bills like I have been occurring. Unfortunately I won’t be able to repeat this since I have a traffic ticket, car repair, and quarterly health insurance bill to pay for this month.

I’m going to try again to reduce my food bill.  I was very close to my budgeted amount of $100 but I think I can spend less.  A large percentage of my food budget is spent on impulse junk food purchases.  If I can eliminate or reduce these purchases my food budget should go down plus I’ll be healthier.  Since I work in a pizza restaurant I need to take advantage of the free food available to me and use that to satisfy my junk food cravings.  Entertainment should stay low because I received a $50 AMC gift card for opening a bank account. Also I stopped seeing the woman I was dating so there won’t be any expense there.  Debt reduction will probably also be less since my other expenses will leave me with less available to pay on debt.

Credit Card Is Paid Off

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My final credit card payment should go through today leaving me with no credit card debt.  I can’t get too excited about this since I still have about $57,000 in student loans but it is progress.  One positive thing is that I  now know that I won’t run my credit card debt back up with frivolous purchases.  Another thing is that I won’t have a generic debt expense anymore, it will all be student loans.  My credit card debt was a mixture of a student loan debt balance transfer and miscellaneous expenses such as food, clothing, gas, etc. so I wasn’t sure what I was paying off.

Now that I have my credit card paid off I have two new goals for my money.  One is to pay off my private student loan that has an interest rate of 11.75% and a balance of just under $2000.  The other goal is to fully fund my Roth IRA.  The maximum contribution is $4000 for this year and I’ve only contributed $150 so far.  I have until April of next year to get this funded.  For now my plan is to split any extra money equally between the two goals although I’m considering just focusing on one goal and completing it than focusing on the other.