Envelope Budgeting

I've been doing this for months and never realized it was an actual method of budgeting. My cousin mentioned it to me this past weekend and I was shocked. I thought I was being terribly clever.

I can't manage money to save my immortal soul. If I have money in the bank I'll spend it, no question. However if I have the money physically in hand it's much harder to spend it. If I have the physical money stashed somewhere it becomes painful to spend it.

So, I end up with a large number of envelopes, each holding some amount of money. My paycheck is direct deposited and I pull out the vast majority of it and stash it in envelopes. When the time comes to pay a given bill I pull out the envelope containing the money that has been set aside for this purpose.

As an extension of this behavior I have a large number of accounts and multiple banks, money goes into accounts and automatic bill payments take the money out and I simply don't have to worry. I find this method advantageous as it's a pain to drive to a bunch of different banks to pull money out, so the money doesn't get spent.

Saving via obfuscation. It works for me, I've managed to put away $1,100 in savings, I've paid off thousands of my debt consolidation loan and my bills are all current. I know what I have to spend for the week and once everything is covered what ever is left over turns directly into play money.

I hope to have five thousand saved by years end, let's see how close I come!

R.I.P. Lappie

Last night, our new cat Soleil chewed through the power cord on my laptop. A month or two ago he did the same to The Missus's laptop cord. At the moment we have one functioning computer. It's a pain to say the least. It's not so much that he did it that upsets me as it is that he did it twice, and replacing the AC adapters is simply something we can not afford.

I have two desktops in the house currently not being used. One needs a video card and hard drive, the other a hard drive. I don't think I can afford to get either machine running.

But I'm going to try.

Looking at Amazon I can get both packs for roughly fifty dollars, if I can get an inexpensive hard drive then we can possibly make things work. I may even buy two drives and get both desktops up and running. You can never have too many machines after all.

Cats Are Like Kids

And I have two of them...

I once heard a very wise man say you should never let your kids outnumber you. I think the same applies to cats. Dealing with one was easy, a piece of cake. Dealing with two is quickly becoming a trying experience.

Soleil, the second cat is roughly a year old. he was a stray for a portion of his life and when we adopted him he had a cold. We were told it was not going to be an issue. The vet who told us that, lied.

Within a week or two Puma, our original cat, was sick and it all went down hill from there. What started as a cold morphed into a deep racking chest cough and then she contracted an eye infection, most likely from Soleil as well. By the time we took her to the vet her eye was pussing up, she was hacking horribly and had lost almost a pound of weight.

We got her on eye medication and considered returning Soleil. In the end we kept him, and she began to recover. Yet this past weekend we return home to find that in the span of 24 hours her eye has gone from fully clear to swollen shut and covered in green puss. So, off to the ER we went.

In the ER the vets diagnosis was much the same, viral URI, bacterial cold, and a viral eye infection. Keep her on the eye ointment and now antibiotics. Joy.

So, after sinking several hundred dollars into this cat she is hopefully on the mend and has reaffirmed my desire to never, ever, have kids.