Spending, Life, Income and Food Updates… 4/2/2012

Monday came way too fast. Luckily it’s only a 4 day work week. I hope everyone’s week went great! Our vacation went by way too quick.

Above are 2 more pictures from our vacation and it’s the beach that is right in front of our hotel. I’ll try and do a recap before the end of this week. I took around 400 pictures though, so deciding which ones to put up will be super difficult!

Thanks to everyone who guest posted for me and those who commented on their stories! I’m still trying to go through my reader and catch up on everything and everyone. If there’s anything new I should know, please share! Leave a comment or an e-mail.

I don’t mind this at all, because I love planning and dreaming about vacations. Yes, I’m a loser. Make fun of me now. However, I hate the stress of worrying about whether or not people enjoy what I’ve chosen.

The cheapest flights I can find for people start at around $500 for a round trip ticket. And that seems like a TON. Where do people buy cheaper airfare than that? HELP!

My updates:

Getting rid of my work outfit laziness:  I’m just going to leave this blank. Didn’t work last week of course, so we’ll see how this week will be especially since it will be around 90 degrees each day this week.

School: Only 5 more weeks until the semester is over. I have another exam today and two papers due this month. One is only around 10 pages, and the other is around 20 (I think). Both are single spaced of course and are on relatively super boring topics so it will be difficult.

I really cannot believe that this semester is almost over. I have an advising appointment set for today so that I can do one last graduation check with my adviser to get the OK to graduate in the summer. WHOO HOOO

Extra Monthly Income: I didn’t have too much extra income while on vacation. I did some quick secret shop phone calls but I’m honestly starting to get sick of these and don’t know how many more of these I can willingly do. The pay for some reason is lower than usual and they require more work. Not sure if the secret shop company just got a bad deal or something. Either way, not worth it.

Budget Cutting: Didn’t cut anything out this past week of course.

Spending: I will definitely need to do a recap of our spending for the past week. Lets just say I splurged and rented a Jeep instead of an economy car while on our trip and it was super expensive. Much more than the $250 that I originally quoted. I’m ashamed of how much we spent on a rental car.

We definitely need to control our spending this month but without a car loan (since I paid it off completely whoo hoo again!), we are still paying off a lot of my student loans. Our bills, mortgage, food, etc are all around 50% of what we make every month. So the other 50% is getting aggressively thrown at debt and savings. Very very nice!

I also bought a couple of things with Amazon gift cards from Swagbucks. If you haven’t signed up yet, then I definitely would. You get points for different things such as searching (just like on Google). Points add up kind of quickly and I always redeem for $5 gift cards to Amazon.

Food: We went grocery shopping right after we got home and bought a ton of food in order to stock back up. Spent around $118, but it should last us quite a bit. We don’t think we will eat out for awhile, we are tired of restaurants and want actual good food. Yay for cooking at home!

How’s your spending going?