Hey everyone! Happy Monday. This past weekend was a very relaxing one, but I did get a good amount of work done. The weather was also fantastic. It was almost a little too cold for windows to be open at night!
The picture to the left is from yesterday when we went for a long drive. We live in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, and drove around in Illinois along the river. There were tons of boats out yesterday! Perfect weather for it. Definitely makes us want a sailboat.
I have been thinking about travel a lot lately. I am thinking about a road trip to the Pacific Northwest.
There are a lot of outdoorsy activities that I want to do there. I also want to go to Colorado in the winter time, go to Chicago to visit family, and hopefully go somewhere warm with a nice beach and good drinks.
An Alaskan cruise has been on my mind also. Can you tell that my mind is just all over the place? 🙂
This is what will be great about self-employment, the freedom to do things that I want. However, until I know how self-employment will be for at least a little while, travel will wait until I am certain that some long-term travel won’t kill our budget and savings.
Spending
Spending has been fairly low the past couple of weeks. I can’t really think of too many things that we have bought lately. I did go to a thrift store the other day and found some aviator Ray Bans for only $35 (yes, they are real), and I had to get those immediately as I was thinking about buying a pair, but at $150 I am not interested.
We did find out that we need to buy new tires for the Camaro already. AH! The car only has 8,000 miles on it which hurts even more, but oh well.
Food spending has been lower than ever, and we are doing great with eating in more often. It does help that we have been too lazy to go to restaurants and prefer the comfort of eating in our own home. We are wanting to start our own garden as well. Does anyone know of any good intro to gardening blogs?
Extra Income (does not include income from our main jobs)
Extra income was good in the past two weeks. September seems like it will turn out to be a strong month. I’m hoping that it will be better than August.
If anyone needs any help, check out my Hire Me page and let me know what services you are interested in. Lately, a few other website owners have asked me to help run their website while they are gone for just a month or two, so this is a new service that I am also offering. If you are starting a new job, about to have a baby, want to do some long-term travel or something else, please let me know.
I do need to start ramping up my side hustles, as lately I haven’t been trying to get myself out there as much and contact potential new clients. I’m really just focusing on providing high quality work to my current clients. However, soon I will have plenty more time and I want to fill up these time slots with other work of course.
I have started making some major steps towards my self-employment switch date. I will be making an announcement once everything is said and done so that I can protect myself. Stay tuned… 🙂
Posts from Making Sense of Cents:
Credit Score vs. Credit Report – Do you know the difference between a credit score and a credit report? Do you know what your score is?
Things I probably wouldn’t do to save/make money – There are a lot of things that I wouldn’t do to save money. Yes, I am frugal in some cases, but I won’t do something crazy to save $5. Would you reuse toilet paper or live in someone’s attic?
How much do you spend on food? – Jordann and her husband spend around $400 a month on food. We would like to be somewhere around that point as well.
Things to do in St. Louis – There aren’t many St. Louis bloggers, and because of this I am constantly asked what people should do when they visit here. Here is a great list. I might do a follow-up and include restaurants and some nice areas to walk around and shop in old neighborhoods.
Is cable or satellite worth it? – We have been thinking about either downgrading our TV package and/or eliminating it completely and choosing something different such as Netflix. Right now we pay around $60, how much do you pay?
Link love:
Do you define yourself by your career? Mo Money Mo Houses – This is something that I have been thinking about for a while, and I also have a post in the works about it. Since I am leaving my job soon, I have had a lot of people look down on my decision, almost like I am letting them down.
How to get brands to notice your blog Frugal Beautiful – Soon, I want to start reaching out to more companies to see if they would like to partner up. This is a great post about that!
Risk Reward and Taking Action Single Moms Income – Alexa is an awesome freelancer and is making the switch soon. Congrats!
What if I never borrowed money? I Heart Budgets – What would your life be like if you never borrowed money? This is an interesting read.
Being healthy
This section has been a complete fail lately. I must be doing something right because my wedding dress was a little too big when I picked it up, and I need to get it taken in (I ordered it to perfectly match me). I have been doing well with eating a little more healthy, and I have been going on a couple of long walks every week.
I have been thinking about joining that Diet Bet thing that everyone is talking about. You put something like $30 into a group pot and if you lose a certain amount of weight then you get to split the pot. Sounds interesting to me. I know that the dollar amount isn’t something that would kill me to lose, but I definitely do think that it would be a good motivator to be more healthy.
Have any of you done this Diet Bet program? Tell me about it!
Wedding Planning
My wedding dress arrived last week! I picked it up on Saturday, and all of my dress regret is gone. I am so in love with it. Some of you are probably thinking that I’m overreacting, but I tried the dress on in pink (they didn’t have it in white), so I was afraid that when it arrived in white that I wouldn’t like it anymore.
I still have not decided on wedding colors. I’m stuck between cream, blush and peach. All very similar but still hard for me to decide. We also need to send out our save the dates soon. And find a caterer. And a DJ. And find a tent, chair, and table rental company. The other things can wait a little bit longer.
I do have a post about how I’m churning credit cards to help pay for my bachelorette party in Vegas. Should be live either Tuesday or Wednesday. I know, I know, some people think that it’s tacky that I am helping plan my own bachelorette party, but I really do not care. I always plan our girls’ vacations, so why would this be any different? I also don’t want my girls to spend a lot of money on the trip, so I’m working on racking up points to help pay for the trip.
Have you been doing well with your extra income, spending and being healthy?
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