Frugalredhead's Personal Finance Blog

Hi everyone! I haven't been on in forever, looks like the boards have been pretty quiet.

You may remember that I was waiting to hear about job news last time I was on here. Well, I got a promotion to manager, with a 17% raise, which is awesome. I am at a different hospital, still part of my hospital system, but a larger facility which will give me wonderful experience and I am loving it.

However, they did not give me the head job like they basically told me they would. Instead, they hired someone at the Director level (we had never had a director level position in my department before) and she is a completely insane, rude, crazy bitch. We (my coworker and I) have already been in HR because she went off on my coworker for something she didn't do and was completely unprofessional and verbally abusive. She has made enemies all over the facility and everybody hates her. I can only hope that she won't last long. She's close to retirement, so maybe she'll hate working with us and just decide to retire.

Otherwise, I love my job itself, am still working my 2nd job, which I think I have about a year and a half left to do before all CC debt is paid off. I have most all of my CC debt transferred at interest rates of 4.99% or less so I can pay them off faster.

I'll try to check in more often, but am just plugging along trying to get stuff paid off!

One debt down, many more to go But it feels good to have something paid off! It was a $2500 student loan at 4% interest and now it's gone. Next up is $4500 on my Discover card, which should be paid off in 3-4 months.

I'm supposed to interview for the permanent manager position next week, so hopefully there will be a big raise in my near future as well!

So I have been made the interim manager at my job, which came with a 5% pay raise. I will begin interviewing soon (I hope) for the permanent job and will then negotiate my permenent salary. The job is a lot more work than before, but I am loving it because I was bored to tears before!

As for debt payoff, I had been focusing only on credit cards for now, but decided to add in my smallest student loan (a private one) and our pop up camper. I had been trying to pay off the highest interest rate first, but have found myself losing steam since I wasn't paying anything off as quickly as I'd like. So I've gone back to the Dave Ramsey way of smallest balance first. My student loan will be paid off in another 2 weeks, then the next smallest credit card about 3 months after that. I feel like doing it this way will give me the motivation to keep at it. It is nice to know that I will soon (most likely) have some extra money due to the new job to put towards everything.

We had an unexpected mini vacation last weekend... my in laws had a beach house in North Carolina for the week, so we decided to join them from Friday to Monday. My kids had never swam in the ocean (we've only gone to the beach in the winter for a Christmas event) and they had a blast playing in the ocean and hanging out with their grandparents, aunt, uncles, and little cousin. The house was right on the ocean, and they didn't let us pay for a thing, except one grocery trip that my husband made and then we paid for his parents at the aquarium. All in all, we spent about $300 for everything, including gas to get there, which isn't bad for a family of 4 on a 4 day vacation!

We certainly could have used that money to put towards debt, but my brother in law is leaving for Marine Corp boot camp this weekend and sometimes you can't put a price on family time (especially when the price is pretty modest!)

Placed my first Zaycon chicken order this week to be picked up in November! $1.88/lb for 40 lbs of boneless skinless chicken breasts. The quality is supposed to be much better than the cheap store brand chicken that I can get for $1.99/lb so I am excited to try it! I'll have to make my deep freezer is relatively empty to make room for all of that chicken. I will be spending some time planning what meals to make with all of it! I plan on leaving some whole, cutting some up for chicken nuggets or stir fry, and who knows what else.

Hope everyone is having a wonderful summer!

Well they officially asked me yesterday to be the interim manager for all 3 hospitals in my hospital system! I love the one I am at, and would have to move to the biggest of the 3 hospitals, which is a slightly farther commute. I figured out an alternate route which, according to Mapquest, is only about 2 minutes longer and avoids the toll, so hopefully that won't be too bad! It also comes with a 5% raise, that will turn into a lot more if I decide to take the position permanently.

They said they know I want to move up in my career, and they can't afford to lose me, so if I want to be the manager of all 3 hospitals, it's mine, and if I don't like, I can come back to my hospital and be the manager just over here.

I guess they really really like me!

I had a balance of $555 on a Chase card that had a 0% promo until next month, and I paid the whole thing off with the paycheck from my 2nd job today Next card to tackle is my Discover card, balance of $4K at 3.99%. I should have that paid off in just over 3 months. Great motivation!

So several weeks ago I heard about a manager position coming open at one of our sister hospitals. I am required, as in internal candidate, to tell my boss I am applying, so I did, and she passed it on to her superiors. As a result, they are working on changing the reporting structure of my position, making me a manager here (of myself, but hey, it's still a title!) and giving me a pay raise (no idea how much).

The position I am planning on applying for still hasn't been posted so there has been no progress there. I have no idea what's taking them so long. It would be a minimum of a $12K raise, and probably closer to $20K, realistically.

Then today my boss gave her notice. Now they REALLY need to keep me! We have 2 other people who started in September, neither of whom are board certified (I am). I was supposed to hear about the changes to my current position "early this week" and here we are on Wednesday, but that's probably good because now that my boss is leaving I'll have more negotiating power.

So no matter what happens, it will mean a promotion and more money for me, but I just don't know exactly what or when that will be! Hopefully it will be more money than I ever could have hoped for and I can get this CC debt paid off even faster!

Hi all! So I have some potential changes coming on the job front and I was just thrown a curveball. So my immediate supervisor is a lovely woman but kind of a train wreck, and the person our whole department now reports to is a raging bitch (pardon my french, haha). My plan had always been to stay here until my supervisor retires, and then apply for her position, but the way things are now, I wouldn't want it! I happen to know she has currently applied for another job and is waiting to hear back.

So there is now a manager opportunity in my field, head of a department of 4 people, with my same company but a different hospital (so all seniority, vacation time, 401K matching, etc would transfer), that will be posted any day now and I am going to apply for. There has been a lot of turnover there but I have heard things are getting a lot better (from the people I would be supervising).

So I went down today to tell the head of my hospital that I was going to apply for it. I don't report to her, so I didn't need let her know per policy, but I like and respect her and wanted her to hear it from me (someone else who works here is married to "raging bitch" boss and I don't trust him to keep his mouth shut after wife tells him at the dinner table tonight).

She told me that she has been pushing to have me report directly to her, and asked me if I would consider staying if it came with a title change (to manager) and a pay raise. I told her I would certainly consider it, but that it would need to happen fast because I expect this other opportunity to come fast (I've already spoken to the hiring manager and they seem to really want me to come work there). I'm not going to stay here on the promise that something will happen in the future that might never actually happen. She said she will go to our CEO today and tell her that they need to do whatever it takes to keep me here.

So bottom line is, I love my hospital, I love the person I would wind up reporting to, and I would most definitely stay if they made me a good offer.

So when they come to me and ask what it would take to make me stay, how much do I ask for?? I've use salary.com, payscale.com, and indeed.com, and I don't make anywhere near what those sites say I "should" be making. I have never found those sites to be all that accurate. My field is small and specialized so there's not a lot to go off of from online research. I was thinking that if I took the new manager position at the other hospital, I'd ask for about 10% more, but knowing my company they'd offer me a fair bit less than that.

Any advice from people who have been there? I've never been told "tell me what we need to give you to make you stay" before and I want to ask for as much as they might reasonably give me without looking crazy!

So my husband got a company phone in January, and we finally decided to cancel his personal cell phone! he didn't like carrying 2 phones around and there's no reason for us to pay for his 2nd phone if we didn't need to. That will save us $50 a month, but of course we got hit with a $290 early termiantion fee. However, his phone was only 3 months old so I am selling thephone and we will break about even.

I have tried to sell it on Facebook groups, Craigslist, etc., in an attempt to avoid Ebay where they will take 10% of my money and then Paypal will take even more of what I have left... any suggestions?

When I googled different sites they all offered me about $210 for the phone, which it seems I can sell on Ebay for about $290 (minus all of the fees, but I would still come out with about $240 or so profit, almost enough to cover the termination fee).

We also refinanced my husband's truck and got a lower payment, so more to add to the snowball!

Thank you creditcardfree!!! After seeing your post, I went on that site and listed a Macys gift card that had about $7 left on it, and 3 Starbucks gift cards that would have taken me years to go through. All in all, I made almost $30!

In other news, I had a set of my boys' Geotrax train tracks that I had been trying to sell for almost a year with no luck. Through a fitness group I belong to, I heard about a family whose mom just walked out on them and left the dad with 3 kids, 2 of which are boys who are 2 and 4 years old. he dad doesn't have a lot of money to buy any extras for them, and the mom has more or less disappeared. I arranged a drop off of clothes, diapers (don't know why they were still in the closet, my youngest has been potty trained for over a year!), and the set of train tracks to be brought to them. Giving those train tracks to kids who are going through what they've been through was far more satisfying than selling them for cash. I had never met this woman (a neighbor) in my life, and she cried and hugged me when she saw all the stuff I had for them. Sometimes money isn't everything!

So we embarked on this debt payoff journey just over a year ago and have paid of $16K in credit card debt since (Still have $74K to go). I have 5 credit cards in my name and DH has 3. The vast majority of our balances are on my cards and he now has about $13K on his. So when I was setting up our debt avalanche, I asked him what his interest rates and balances were, and he was very wishy washy about it. Most of his balances are currently under various promo rates from doing balance transfers, and he assured me that they were all less than what my highest interest card was, so he has just kept paying the minimums on his cards while I throw all of our extra at my highest interest credit card.

Several times over the past 15 months, I have suggested to him that he let me take care of all of the credit card payments and he take over all of the monthly bills. See, we still have separate checking accounts and we each just have certain bills we're responsible for. We lived together before we were married and did it this way then, and have just always kept it that way because we were comfortable with it. We are both very responsible in terms of paying the bills, so neither of us ever worried that something wasn't getting paid or anything like that.

So anyway, we sold our kayaks yesterday and made $800. I took this opportunity to ask him AGAIN to please look up his balances and interest rates and let me make note of them so I can make sure we're attacking our cards in the proper order. I'm a bit type A (okay, more than a bit) and it has been driving me crazy that I don't have complete control over how much we're paying on what. He has been paying more than the minimums on cards with 3.99% interest rates when I would rather put that extra towards my 12.74% card. So anyway, he did check them, and it turns out that he has a $1200 balance on a card with a 15.49% interest rate!! I imeediately told him to take that $800 and pay that card, and on my next paycheck I would give him the balance to pay it off.

SEE!! This is why I want control over it! I am shocked that he didn't even realize what his interest rate was. Of course my obvious irritation with him turned into an argument, and now it's practically giving me heart palpitations to not be in charge of all the credit cards. I am hoping he'll give it some more thought today and realize that I am right and we should adjust the way we've done things for the last 13 years.

I'm so frustrated

I haven't posted any blogs in a long time. It's been quite a year so far.

Most recently, my grandma died on Friday and we're heading to NY for the wake and funeral on Tuesday. It'll be an added expense, but we knew it would be coming soon and deliberately didn't make plans to go to NY this summer because we knew we'd probably be making this trip. She was 88, had battled cancer for a very long time (12 years) and stopped chemo about 5 years ago. They told us 19 months ago that she had a week to live, so I am extremely grateful for all the extra time we had with her, and glad she is no longer in pain. Also tremendously sad, as we were very close.

In other life news, we just returned from a 10 day vacation to Disney World, almost entirely paid for by cashing in my vacation time from work. Could I have cashed it in and put it all towards my debt instead? Sure, but we decided to do this instead and it was worth it to us.

DH now has a company car and we are selling his pickup truck. We will probably make about $7000 profit on it (we owe $9K and it's worth $16-17K), and then save $400 a month in truck payments, $60 a month in insurance, and about $300 a year for personal property tax.

We are then debating between selling our popup camper, or putting a hitch on the minivan so we can tow it locally (which is where we do most of our camping anyway). The problem with selling the camper is that we are underwater on it, and while we could take the profit from the truck and pay off the camper and then sell it, I think it is better use of our money to put it towards the credit cards which have a higher interest rate. I'm not sure exactly what we'll decide to do there....

But we are still making good progress!

On Monday, a high school classmate of mine lost her husband in a car accident on icy roads. He was 32 and they have an 8 month old baby. On the same day, there was a fire down the street from one of our family members, and a 12 year old and her grandmother passed away. Granddaughter ran back into the house to try and save her grandma, and the little girl's dad ran in after them to try and save his daughter and his mother. He's the only one who made it out. Today we had icy weather here, and my husband's coworker's father was killed in an accident. His truck slid off the icy road and it was 5 hours before anyone saw his truck down the embankment. Can't help but wonder if he could have been saved if he was found earlier. What a depressing start to 2015! I wish everyone a healthy and safe rest of the year!

I haven't had a day alone with my 7 year old son in a while, and the 3 year old had a birthday party to go to today, so hubby took the 3 year old to his party and I spent the day with my first baby We went out to Chili's for lunch, and we have the Kids Dine Free membership (which you typically can get for about $10-15 for a 3 month membership) so his meal was free. They have tablets at all the tables now, and so being the technologically savvy child that he is, he grabbed it and started playing games. Well, apparently, they charge you $1.99 for playing games. We're used to going to Buffalo Wild Wings where their games are all free. He swears that there was nothing that told him it was going to cost money, and he is pretty responsible with those things (he learned his lesson after he charged up $45 in movies at a hotel a couple of years ago, which they graciously took off of our bill because they could see that we didn't actually watch the movies.) Anyway, I protested the charge and they took it off our bill.

So lunch cost us $14, then I had 2 free movie tickets from my MIL so we saw Annie, which didn't cost us a thing. I promised him that we could go to Sweet Frog for frozen yogurt after the movie if we didn't buy any popcorn or candy at the theater (their prices are nuts!) So movie cost nothing.

Then we went to Sweet Frog, for which he had a $5 gift certificate for some contest that his 2nd grade class won, so that cost us $0.67.

So 5 hours of fun with my sweet baby for $15 - I was pretty proud!

And my husband was left with the 3 year old who threw a temper tantrum at his friend's karate birthday party, wouldn't do any karate at the party place, and wouldn't even let go of his leg to go eat cake. I think I got the good child today

I did a lot of frugal things today that I am proud of! We had several varieties of "past their prime bread" - parts of 2 different loaves of bread and half a bag of hot dog rolls, so I made my own bread crumbs! Never did that before but read about it on a Dave Ramsey grocery budgeting FB page I am on, so I figured I'd give it a whirl. I got about 4 cups of bread crumbs out of it and it was so easy!

One of my Christmas presents from DH was a special pan where you can make different "pockets". You use pizza dough or pie crust dough for the top and bottom, and then you can fill it with whatever you want, and bake in the oven. So I made a batch of pizza dough in my breadmaker instead of buying store-bought dough.

I also got a mini-loaf pan for Christmas, and made 6 mini loaves of raisin bread.

I organized and took inventory of my kitchen freezer and the deep freezer in the garage, and I have quite a bit of stuff that I had forgotten about. Tomorrow I will make my meal plan for the next week and a half or so, trying to use a lot of that food. I don't think I should need to buy anything next week other than milk, produce, and maybe some lunch meat. I have a huge stock of homemade and frozen muffins, pancake, and egg muffins for the kids for their breakfasts. I can't believe I forked out the money for those pre-packaged muffins and frozen pancakes for so long!

I have gotten so into making food from scratch, eating less processed foods (although we still eat our fair share, but every little decrease helps!) Not only does it save me money, but it's healthier too!

Since everyone else is doing it

According to my debt avalance worksheet, I will have paid off another $26,000 in credit card debt by December 2015. My biggest goal is to actually achieve that without setbacks. That is counting on a $2K tax refund, which there is a chance it could be more, but this is my first full year working my 2nd job, and so I am not sure yet how that will affect my tax return. If I still get a decent refund for 2014, I will adjust my withholdings for 2015.

If anyone saw my post about DH getting a company car, that is part of the next goal. We have decided to hold onto his pickup truck until June, and camp as much as we can during the spring (the time of year that we do most of our camping anyway). In June we will sell the truck, expecting approximately a $7000 profit, which will also go directly towards the credit cards.

That will reduce our total amount of CC debt by $33K, which would be incredible to achieve in one year!

I have been pretty successful at keeping our grocery budget at $400 a month in the last few months, and hope to keep that up as well.

I've also lost 18 pounds this year and want to keep it off!

So my mother in law works in HR and emailed me on Wednesday and said that they just processed a $600 bonus for me! My company doesn't give Christmas bonuses or anything like that, so the only thing I can think of is that my director finagled something for me getting my certification in October. It was put in as "on cal pay" and I am on call 24 hours a day and don't get any extra pay, so it's definitely not really on call pay. It will probably be $400 after taxes, so that will all go to my Discover card.

We are in NY this weekend visiting my family, so we will have some extra expenses. Just paid $32 to book a parking spot in Manhattan tomorrow for my dad's 65th birthday party, which is a lunch paid for by his girlfriend. We spent $50 on 2 pizzas today (yikes, NY prices!!) but this will feed us tomorrow night and possibly Sunday night as well. Have a family brunch Sunday that will be about $100 for my family of 4. Having some girlfriends over to our hotel Sunday night but that won't cost anything. We packed snacks for the drive today, and ate lunch when we got to my grandma's house, whereas we usually stop for a $35 lunch on the road.

Also on a good financial note, DH ordered his company car today! It will take 2-3 months to come in, most likely, but when it does, we think we will sell his pickup truck, giving us about a $7000 profit, to be put towards credit cards. We won't have any way to pull our popup camper then, but we are upside down on it, so have decided to just keep it for a while. I'd rather use that $7K to pay off higher interest credit card debt that to pay off the difference in what we owe on the camper. We can still have "campouts" in the backyard, and might be able to borrow my in-laws truck if we want to go camping with it a few times. We'll play that by ear.

Hope everyone had a great Christmas!

My Chase card is completely paid off and now I am working on the Discover card. I have about $1700 in monthly charges that go on that card (daycare, gas, home security and home warranty, etc) but I am paying just over $3100 on it each month. The Discover card and the Chase Slate card will be paid off in April, then the Bank of America card will take another year. Then the Capital One and Citibank cards will take another 8 and 9 month to pay off, respectively, with $75K of credit card debt paid off by January 2017.

DH has about $15000 on credit cards in his name, which all have pretty low interest rates, so those will take another 6 months after that, and then the pop-up camper will take 3 more months.

So by the end of 2017, we'll just be left with mortgage, car loans (DH's truck will be paid off by then though), and student loans. Still seems so far away, but this past year has gone so fast and has really motivated me to keep at it!

Also, my youngest will start kindergarten a few months before my CCs are paid off, so that will be extra money to throw towards the rest of the debt as well.

Not too much to report on the finances front, just plugging along We did decide to go to Disney world in February. I have cashed in a lot of my vacation time, enough to pay for more than 2/3 of the trip. Also, I bought Disney gift cards at Kroger when they were giving 4x the fuel points, and then used those to pay for the trip (plus earn cash back on my credit card and then paid it off with the vacation time). By doing it this way, I'll save almost $200 in gas and earn $40 cash back. I realize that we could/should have used the money I'm getting to pay down more debt, but I'm working REALLY hard and sacrificing a lot of time with my family. We're looking forward to this trip together!


I've done an awesome job staying within our grocery budget (trying to stick to $400-500 a month). Instead of buying frozen meals for lunch, I'm making whole boxes of pasta and then portioning and freezing them myself. I'm planning our meals out for each week and only buying what I need for those meals. Tonight was bowtie pasta with light alfredo sauce and bacon, and green beans. Why have I never put bacon on my pasta before?? So delicious!!

I didn't update my debt for October because I had the charges for the Disney gift cards on my account and in't be paying them off until next Friday. I didn't want to see the increase and get depressed. Will update when I do my November balance check!

So I am getting ready to take a certification exam for my profession, after 2 years on the job. In July, I submitted my paperwork for my eligibility, and got the okay to sit for my exam. I had planned on taking it sooner, but life got in the way, work got busy and I didn't have time to study. I've been studying a lot in the last 2 weeks though, so today I went online to schedule my exam and saw that I only had 90 days from the day they sent me the email!! They sent it July 9th, so 90 days is Tuesday October 7th, and what do you know, they had an opening at 8:30 on Tuesday for the exam. Had I not scheduled it, I would have had to start my application over and paid the $350 test fee again (my job reimbursed me the first time, but I can assure you they wouldn't have paid it again!)

SO I will be doing lots of studying between now and Tuesday morning. I can't believe I almost screwed myself so badly.

Wish me luck!

I bought 2 whole roaster chickens instead of boneless, skinless chicken breasts. Roasted them and got 9 cups of shredded & chunked chicken out of them to make pulled bbq chicken sandwiches, casseroles, etc. Then I used the bones and made my own broth! never done it before so I was a little nervous, but I think it turned out fine. I got 6 cups of broth to freeze (6 bags of 1 cup each) and enough left over to freeze 4 ice cubes worth in case I just need a little bit for something.

Also got a good deal on pork shoulder so hubby can make pork bbq next week. I'll probably freeze a bunch of that even though he usually doesn't want to... I don't mind eating bbq every day for a week, but the kids get tired of it after day 2 so then we always wind up either eating more than we should so that we don't throw it out, or just throwing some out. I'll freeze some and not tell him Will be great for pulled pork quesadillas, one of our favorite meals!

I really did need shoes, and we went to the outlets and I bought 2 pairs of really cushy walking sandals that were BOGO 50% off ($78 for both) and I needed new dress shoes. The pair of black heels I owner were from before kids (so at least 8 years ago) and therefore before pregnancy made my feet wider. So I had to squeeze into them for a funeral a few weeks ago and they hurt SO badly. Paid $40 for those.

Before going there though, I had done some shoe shopping online. Not only are my feet wide, but they are also tiny, so most shoe stores don't even carry shoes in my size and I have to buy online. So since I can't try them on, I bought 7 pairs and will return all the ones that don't fit. But it still makes me panicky to see those charges on my credit card even though almost all of them will be refunded!

Spent more at the grocery store than I wanted to, had to get gas, etc. I will have to pay a little less than I wanted to on my remaining credit card debt, but I'll get back on track!

In Christmas shopping news, I belong to a local mom to mom facebook group, and someone is selling an unused Super mario checkers game for $10. Buying it for my 7 year old for Christmas who is Super Mario obsessed and just learned how to play checkers

In addition, I listed 3 Halloween costumes for sale and a bunch of my 3 year olds clothes that he outgrew, so hopefully will sell all of that!

So I got my schedule for October and half of November for my part time job last night, and they put me on a lot more evenings than I had wanted. I talked to DH about it last night, and he is fully supportive for whatever we need to do, but it is hard. I asked him what he thought about the schedule and if he thought I should tell them I need to be off a couple of the evenings, and he asked "well, do you want the money?" Well duh, of course I do, but at what expense? I have 2 little boys who I get less time with than I would like, but what I am doing is for the benefit of our family. I worked last night and get home after they've gone to bed, and I had a 7 AM meeting this morning and left before they woke up. I hate going so long without even being able to get a hug and kiss from them (luckily this doesn't happen often).

I want to work as much as is reasonable to get out of this debt, but I also don't want to burn myself out and miss out on valuable time with my kids while they are still little. I can say though, that since I took this part time job, we value our time together more and do more things together when I am off, as opposed to sitting around the house in separate rooms.

There isn't really a right or wrong answer, I guess, just thinking out loud...

I'm going to try and make this as short and sweet as possible.

2 years ago, I left a job that I loved in the hospital lab to come do infection control. I really enjoy both jobs.

Pros of current job: very flexible, I get to work from home if snowing, kids are sick, etc. Learning a lot, can be very interesting at times. My boss is awesome.

Cons of current job: I don't have enough work to do and I get very bored sometimes. I am in an office by myself and it gets lonely. I thought I would have alot more opportunity for advancement in this field, but I am finding that in my area, hospitals outside of my company only want to hire nurses for this job. My boss will retire in 5-10 years probably, but I'm not sure I want to be in charge - she is extremely overworked.


Pros of new job: Back with the people I love and used to manage, I would love the actual job.

Cons of new job: Although I love them, the people I ued to manage are whiners and some days they drove me nuts Boss doesn't have kids, is very work centered and I feel would be less understanding of my need for work/life balance.


Salary: I would get a 6.4% raise, but would be at the top of the salary range and therefore wouldn't get yearly raises after that, just a bonus in the amount that the raise would have been (so no compounding year over year). I did the math and it would take 5 years of a 1.75% raise in my current job (that's what we got this year) to get me up to what the salary would be in the new job.

Between the raise and what I would save on gas and tolls, new job would net me an extra $250 a month.

I was hoping it would either be so much money that I couldn't say no, or so little money that I couldn't say yes... now I'm not sure what to do.

Any advice?

I have $89 left on it and that will be gone with Fridays paycheck and then on to that Discover card with the highest interest rate! I can't believe I have paid off over $8000 since the beginning of January. According to my debt avalanche spreadsheet, I will have the Discover card paid off next September. A year sounds too long to wait, so I will do everything I can to get it paid off sooner I have been selling a lot on Ebay, and I may be able to cash in some PTO to put towards the card as well. Feels great to make progress!

Everything was needed, and everything was a great deal, but it's still more spending than I have done in a LONG time.

In addition to the 3 tops I got at JCP Saturday for $15, I ordered 2 pairs of shoes for myself last night - I needed a new pair of crosstrainers and also a new pair of black work shoes. If the work shoes fit, I'll buy another pair in brown. The shoes I have for work now I bought 2 years ago and they are pretty beaten up.

Today we went to Kohl's - spent another $116 but got 3 pairs of pants for me (I have lost a lot of weight and my old clothes were falling off of me), 4 tops for me, 2 shirts for hubby, and 2 pairs of pajamas and first day of school shirt for my 7 year old. Everything was on sale, plus we had a $10 off coupon and a 30% off coupon. And I got $20 Kohl's cash to use in a couple of weeks.

Then I came home and ordered 3 more pairs of shoes online - sneakers and casual brown shoes for my 7 year old who has outgrown his, and sneakers for my 3 year old who got a hole through his because he "likes to be able to touch his sock".

None of the shoes for the kids were more than $25, which is pretty darn good for shoes! Everything in the stores was $45 and up - I got their 3 pairs on Amazon and 6pm.com. Great places to shoe shop!

Hubby and I split up today - he took our 7 year old out to do a few things, and I took our 3 year old shopping with me.

My 3 year old needed sneakers, but the selection in stores is awful. I found a pair on www.6pm.com for $25 (the same shoes at Stride Rite are $45) and will be ordering those tomorrow. We went to JC Penney, and I had a coupon for $20 off a $50 purchase, and a $25 gift card. I got one sleeveless top, and 2 cardigan sweaters (which makes it cheap and easy to convert my summer work warddrobe to winter - just throw a cardigan on!) for under $15 out of pocket.

Took my munchkin out to lunch using our Kids Dine Free card, cost $10 for both of us. Then went to our local berry farm's market, and got 3 pints of blueberries, 2 pints of strawberries, and 2 cantaloupes (they were free with a $6 purchase) for a total of $8.

Last splurge was frozen yogurt at Sweet Frog, my 3 year old's favorite place on earth. You fill a cup with as much as you want, and you have a ton of toppings to choose from. I'm not crazy about frozen yogurt so I didn't get any, giving us a $2.37 bill for my little one.

Overall a wonderful day with my youngest, for a super cheap amount of money! I do still need to buy a pair or two of pants, as I've lost a good amount of weight and I'm tired of pulling my pants up all day long. That's a good problem to have though

So I like my job enough, and I make good money (about $69K)but I don't have enough work to do and there are a lot of aspects of it that just don't interest me. I look at my boss and can't imagine ever wanting her job - so much tedious & boring work. She's in her early 60's, so it's extremely likely I could have her job when she retires if I stick around.

I've been with the same hospital system for almost 9 years now, and 2 years ago I left being the lab supervisor to go to infection control. So a few months ago, my old boss resigned from her position. After a lot of thinking, I have decided to apply for her job. The lab director seems really excited that I have shown interest. HR can't talk to me about the salary range until I officially apply, and the job just got posted online, so I will apply and then see what they say!

If it is less than I make now, then I will just stick to what I'm doing. I have a lot of flexibility (good to have with 2 young kids) and I have a big office all to myself where I can do whatever I want to when I don't have a lot of work to do. But I am just not all that stimulated by the work. It's by no means a bad job to have, but microbiology is my first love!

Wish me luck and let's hope the salary is much more!!

$711!! Holy crap! Pardon my French I'm unbelievably excited. I was already going to have the Chase card paid off in the next 2 or 3 weeks thanks to the insurance payment for the camper, and now this extra $600ish (after Ebay fees) will be a great start paying down the Discover card!

Okay, I know it's a gamble, but the current bid on my clarinet is $405. Auction ends tomorrow and I have 15 watchers. I have someone offering me $450 if I do a "buy it now" price. I would think with that many watchers, the final bid could very well go higher than $450. I'm thinking that even if it doesn't, and $405 is the final bid, it's already double what I thought I would get for it, so I should just ride it out. I'd be thrilled with $405 and over the moon if it goes even higher!

I have a lot more buying experience than selling, and it seems like in the lat hour or two the prices always start to jump... has that been other's experienes too?

So I decided to sell my clarinet, which was a high school graduation gift from my parents. It was a tough decision, because of the sentimental value, but it's been in the top of a closet for the last 10 years and I figured there was no point in keeping it. I took it to a local instrument store and they said that they thought I could get about $200 for it without doing any of the needed repairs. Well, I was very clear about the work that it needed (corks, pads, and a general tuneup), and after 12 hours on Ebay, the highest bid is $405! I am so excited I guess it's worth more than I thought!