To answer someone’s question about Caltrain, the furthest south it goes is Gilroy which isn’t even past Monterrey (But they do have an In ‘n’ Out! We always stop there on the way to my aunt’s.). I need to go about another 150 miles closer to LA, but I appreciate the suggestion. I hadn’t thought of Amtrak because my options are carpooling, but arriving late enough so I cannot go on a nighttime tour of Hearst Castle, or carpooling with someone leaving earlier, or renting a car expensively.

I’ve received all the comments & messages about problems with the website. Sorry but I don’t know when it will be fixed.

In October, I bought my parents’ plane tickets for Christmas. I put them on my charge plate so there would be no interest incurred. So my credit card debt is up slightly.

November should be better, I hope. Most of my Christmas shopping for other people is done. I really only have a few gifts left to buy for my boyfriend and a couple others. The main thing will be my December spending on holiday while I’m out and about. I’m not sure how I’ll be getting from San Francisco to the Central Coast, or how I’m going to eat. (There are kitchens at the campsite, but people go on lots of day trips too.)

Thank you everyone for entering the contest. I will try to win other contests at work for new giveaways.

I spent a lot of money.

The trip was ~$200, a huge chunk of it was Christmas presents for my cousin’s baby. His birthday is near Thanksgiving and a present to go under the proverbial tree. (~$60, including batteries) There was also a Wallace and Gromit DVD for my nephews in CA (~$10), so I very close to being done my shopping for the season.

I bought 3 tablecloths to pick from and will return the extra one. We need to make the house presentable for Thanksgiving. We’re using our camper table for a second table so we really need to cover it up. Thankfully, they were pretty cheap. (~$34) There was also a welcome mat. I have been holding out for this and found something lovely for ~$10.

There was a wee lamp for tableside (~$18), new socks for me (18 pairs for $24!), and some groceries (dog food, Diet Coke, dishwashing liquid, vitamins, Brita filters.)

I admit, I could have saved money on the presents by waiting longer, but I avoid shopping so if I’m there, I should do it. Could I chalk this up to being a grocery trip? Sort of. But I’m not going to sit here and tell you I had some kind of virtue. This was definitely a splurge and I needed it. I was shoving chocolates in my face as a mood lifter. After eating my 4th chocolate, I decided this was better than eating more candy. Hopefully this weekend will be better.

Yesterday was *almost* a No Spend Day, but again, I didn’t have cash and bought a pack of gum and got cash back for parking. (Parking is a reimbursable expense at work because it’s a client site visit.)

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

I just won a $25 Threadless gift card in a contest giveaway he was running. Yippee!

I used it to buy two t-shirts for me ($9 & $5) and order a cute t-shirt for one of my nephews for his birthday soon. ($9)

Total spent with shipping was $12.99.

To update after this purchase and my spendy trip to NYC, my 2009 clothing expenditure is: $832.39

The good thing is that those expensive new boots get a lot of wear, about 2x a week. I love them! They’re getting nicely burnished to a beautiful darker brown.

But I’m still shopping for a coat.

If you want to win a contest, try entering the $50 iTunes Giveaway I’m running. Contest ends tomorrow night!

1. Driving motivation to be lazy. The days I don’t spend money are days that I don’t want to deal with the general public, i.e. avoid retail spaces. My desire to be at home doing my own thing means I prize being lazy and ostensibly doing nothing. (Knitting and reading apparently are nothing to some people.)

2. Plan, Plan, Plan. 1. Plan your meals. 2. Plan your week. 3. Plan for not spending. If you plan out your meals for the week, taking a good long look at which days you are going to dine out, you can figure out what to make when. That way you can also plan which days you are going to avoid spending and buying extra things. It’s easy to push your spending to days when you know you are going to spend. For instance, you know that on Wednesday you are going to meet a friend for dinner and you know that you will need gas by that same day. So you buy your gas at lunchtime on Wednesday before you meet your friend, or you get it on the way home.

3. Make your week lumpy. Grouping your spending to certain days of the week creates natural efficiencies. For instance, it’s recommended that you run all your short-car trip errands together to save gas. But that also means lumping your spending into those hours. Can you execute your plan so that all your spending is done at the same time, leaving you free time and a financial transaction-free next day?

4. Look at your quotidian habits. Do you ride the bus daily? Do you buy coffee or a newspaper? Bagel? Soda? Chips? Why do you do it? Do you know? Rather than dump $1.35 into the bus coin collector, why not lump your spending into a monthly pass or card? Why not make coffee at home instead? Realizing what little things you do and find a strategy around spending that money or breaking that habit can nurture the incidences of No Spend Days.

I hope these tips help you have a No Spend Day. (Now it’s off to eat a packed lunch! That’s 3 lunches so far this week!)

Thanks for entering! If you haven’t entered, please go to the giveaway post and enter before Friday at midnight (Pacific). It’s easy!

If you have entered the contest, please spread the word!

On Monday, I bought nothing because I had lots of leftovers and groceries in the fridge. On Tuesday, I bought nothing again because I came straight home after work. On Wednesday I bought Baked Cheetos from the vending machine. I spent $1. On Thursday, I bought dinner ($16). On Friday, I bought a lunch ($16) and ate dinner at home.

So that’s two more No Spend Days this year. I am not sure how many more I have left, but surely I can squeeze out a few more. (Like yesterday, on Monday! Today is my regular knitting night so I’ll be buying dinner.)

What do you have to do to win? All you have to do is post a comment below and a random number generator will select the winner.

Rules (ripped off from Free Money Finance)

1. I will be the complete and final judge.

2. Legal disclaimer: I will send out the card out via USPS first class mail, but I will not guarantee delivery of the item.

3. It will be the winner’s responsibility to email me their contact information once the winner is announced. If you win something and do not contact me within a week of winning, I reserve the right to give your prize away to another winner. I won’t track down the winners — it’s your responsibility to leave a valid email address in your comment-entry and then check it to see if I have emailed you as the winner, or return to the contest pages to find out if you’ve won. Your spam blocker is not my problem. I will send out one email to notify you, but if you don’t see it, I will not be held responsible.

4. Local laws, rules, and regulations apply.

5. Winners are restricted to the US because the prize is in US dollars.

6. Comments will close on Friday, October 30th at midnight (with whatever timestamp the webhost puts on it. I think it’s PDT.). I will announce a winner in early November.

If you’ve looked at your investments lately, you might be surprised at how much they have rebounded as the Dow Jones Industrial Average has climbed back above 10000, especially if you’ve got a healthy mix of stocks and bonds and you’ve continued to make new contributions. Even if your portfolio is down, the losses are probably much smaller than you might have feared, given that the broad stock market is still down about 30% from its 2007 highs.

“If you were Rip Van Winkle and had fallen asleep for a year, you wouldn’t have known we had a crisis—and you would have saved a lot of sleepless nights,” says Alexandra Armstrong, a Washington, D.C., financial planner.

Stephen Utkus, a principal with the Vanguard Center for Retirement Research, took a look at Vanguard’s 3.5 million 401(k) and other retirement-savings accounts and found that 60% of those who had accounts on Sept. 30, 2007, showed balances that were flat or up this year compared with two years ago.

I found it fascinating since I’ve done way better than these experts state. I ran some numbers from the recorded net worth I keep with Networth IQ.

Balances as of September
2006-$12,110
2007-$30,050 (a 148% change over 2006)
2008-$31,801 (a 5.8% change over 2007)
2009-$45,397 (a 42.8% change of 2008 and 51.1% over 2009)

See what 4 years of regular saving can do? Even in a lousy market I had about 25% annual returns on my account, primarily due to regular contributions during the down times. What kills me is that dedicating myself to saving over the last 4 years has meant a 275% return, or an annualized return of about 91%. I am sure there is more sophisticated math out there to exclude my contribution amounts and get a more normal rate of return on investment, but the point here is to show you that when you commit to saving, it makes a compelling difference.

In 2006, I worked for a company that provided a small match (50% of the first 5% of salary) and got no bonus, but a huge raise for the next year (~14%).
In 2007, I worked for the same company. I got a small match (2.5% of salary) and a huge bonus (IIRC, 10% of my base).
In 2008, I worked for a new company that provided no match the first year and got no bonus or raise. But my salary went up by ~17% and I got a Roth 401k too.
In 2008, I worked for the same company. I got a great match (6% of salary) and good bonuses (about 7%) and a tiny raise.

I’m glad to hear that 401k matches are coming back. I am super glad to be at a company that didn’t slash the corporate match during the recent lean times. I know that’s been a huge incentive for me to keep my savings up.

I am thinking of rolling all the debt into my HELOC, cutting up my credit cards and making huge payments towards the HELOC. That reduces the number of accounts to manage and I get to take a bigger line item deduction because of the interest on the HELOC.

I’m going to wait to do this till January when my low rate balance transfers expire. The interest rate on the HELOC is holding steady at a very low APR. The problem is that I am afraid that by doing this, I am going to push the total debt on the condo to over its purchase price. That doesn’t seem like a good idea (for various tax reasons). I worked on a few numbers and this could be a viable strategy but I am not confident this is a good decision.

Such is the ongoing challenge of this blog.

$1560 - for three plane tickets to CA from DC and Philly
$162 - for my cabin rental on my camping trip with friends

This does not include the $100 for Christmas presents for the nephews and ~$100-200 for my boyfriend’s present. I’m upping the ante this year because his wishlist looks expensive. Doodads for vintage cars aren’t cheap.

Yeah, I know I said I wasn’t going to spend anymore money on my parents this year after buying them a new roof, but Christmas is my mother’s birthday and it’s really terrible to spend it apart. I’ve bought the plane tickets for my parents, so my sibling will be paying for the hotel my parents will use. I will do a combination of couch surfing with relatives and the hotel suite.

I have to edge in a car rental and trip to LA since it’s an open jaw flight. (Camping is somewhere near Hearst Castle. 5 years of living in CA and I never went. The time is now.)

I got a really bad feeling about this trip in terms of expenses. If I am lucky, I will carpool down to the campsite and crash at someone’s house in LA without needing to rent a car. (For some reason my sibling can always find a car for me to use to chauffeur my parents without me having to spend a dime.)

Oy vey. This is what budgeting is for. Planning stuff out in advance. I hope by my return flight from LA that I will have charged very little to my credit cards from this trip. The plan is to sock cash away for this.

Last week I had to go downtown to meet a client. I didn’t have cash to pay for the parking garage. (WHY DO SO FEW DC PARKING LOTS TAKE CREDIT CARDS? Oh right, because it makes it that much easier to skim the cash…) That meant I had to pay $5 in ATM fees because there wasn’t a bank ATM around. I had to use one inside of a CVS. That’s $3 the ATM’s bank charged me and $2 my own bank charged me. It’s kind of a dumb thing to pay, but I probably go to another bank’s ATM only 4 times a year. I’ve been much better about using my debit card incessantly or taking out cash beforehand.

The other thing that was positively moronic, was that once I paid for the parking, I did not turn in the receipt right away. I’m still going to try and put it in, but I don’t like looking like a bad brownie at work. Timely expense reports is one way to look good so I’m not 100% sure I want to highlight my mistake. But since it’s for $17 and that’s basically 2 lunches, I kind of want that money back.

My charities stayed the same, the local health clinic and food bank. I know that the recession is supposed to be getting better, but this jobless recovery has me thinking skeptically. I’m just not sure that the next year will be dramatically better.

What about you? Are you renewing your commitment to charitable giving or scaling it back?