Good grief! I’ve just been browsing around a site called Deliver Away Debt. This guy decided he was going to pay off his debt by throwing sidestream income at it. The stream? Delivering pizzas.The blog is the story of his adventures in this quest.
Each month, he details his daily earnings and then totals them up. The man is earning $1,400 to $1,800 a month moonlighting 22 hours a week!
You realize…$1,500 was what I netted in 80 hours at a mid-level university administrator’s job, with a Ph.D. and 30 years of experience. LOL! Another boat missed. 😀
Glorioski!
Deliver Away Debt is a member of the Yakezie challenge. He just published 600 Money-Saving Tips that he personally gathered from his fellow Yakezites. It’s quite a compendium!
What with tornado season bearing down on the South and the Midwest and earthquakes rumbling along any number of Western Hemisphere faults, most of us think now and again about emergency preparedness. While it’s crucial to get the people out harm’s way come flood, wind, wildfire, quake or terrorist, the televised sight of all the dogs and cats left behind in the New Orleans flood was heart-rending. Many shelters turn away pets, and even if you find a place that would let your bring your animal on principal, would they really accept your pit bull?
The Pet Evacuation and Transportation Act, signed into law in 2006 by President George W. Bush, requires the Federal Emergency Management Agency to accommodate domestic animals in its emergency and evacuation plans. The government has a disaster readiness site that advises citizens on emergency preparations. Even if you don’t keep a pet, the main page directs you to advice on stocking supplies and navigating your way through an emergency. Where your animals are concerned, a few ahead-of-time strategies can help.
• First, be sure your pet can be identified. Microchip the animal, and dress it in a collar with an ID tag.
• Plan to take your pet with you if you have to evacuate. However, bear in mind that few shelters will accept pets, and so you may have to make your own accommodations. Keep a list of nearby pet-friendly hotels in your emergency kit. Several websites provide leads to hotels and other amenities that allow dogs and cats; Dogfriendly.com is just one of them.
♦ Confirm in advance—now, not after a disaster strikes—that listed hotels actually do accept pets. And keep your list updated, as these policies may change.
♦ Map out several escape routes, and be sure your lists include pet-friendly lodgings in all the possible directions you might go.
• It’s also a wise idea to build a list of veterinarians and boarding kennels in nearby towns and cities. That way, should your pet be injured or get sick, you won’t have to scramble to find help once you’re out of harm’s way.
• When you prepare your own disaster kit, include first-aid and survival items to cover pets, too:
A supply of any meds your pet takes
Ample first-aid supplies
A carrier for each animal
An extra leash and collar for each pet
A week’s supply of bottled water for each pet
A week’s supply of food for each pet
Dishes to feed and water animals
A can opener
Dog beds and toys
Blankets
Cat litter and box for cats; newspapers for dogs
• Some people suggest packing canned or moist pet food, as this reduces the pet’s need for water. Bear in mind that abruptly changing a dog’s diet can induce diarrhea, not something you want to have to deal with in a traffic jam. If you live in a disaster-prone area, it probably would be a good idea to feed the dog routinely with whatever you would want to take with you in an evacuation.
• Work a deal with a neighbor to care for or rescue each other’s pets if one person can’t get home during an emergency. Be sure your pets are familiar with these surrogate caregivers, and supply your neighbor with the same information you’ve created for yourself, let her or him know where you keep the pet emergency kit, and provide signed permission for veterinary and guidelines to financial limits for such care.
When a state of emergency begins, bring your pets indoors. If there’s a great deal of noise or other stressful conditions (as, for example, in a tornado), separate the animals so they do not harm each other in fear. If at all possible, crate each animal separately, and keep them crated if you have to evacuate.
After the emergency passes, keep an eye on your pets. Domestic animals are likely to be disturbed by changes in the environment, including scattered debris, puddles, and other aftermath. Wild animals, also, are highly disturbed and may appear in your yard, where they can confront your pets. Snakes and other creatures may be borne into your area on flood waters.
If you’re forced to leave your pet behind, secure the animal in the safest part of your house and be sure to leave an ample supply of fresh water—possibly twice as much as you think necessary—and plenty of dry food. Leave messages on your doors and windows letting rescue workers know pets are inside.
Have you had experiences with caring for pets during natural disasters or human-caused emergencies? What preparedness steps would you advise?
Lookit this spiffy golden clover! There’s one over on the right sidebar, too. Designed by Eliminate the Muda and CJ Bowker, that’s the badge of the Yakezie Challenge, a network whose members try to break 100,000 in the Alexa rankings.
This scheme the brainchild of Financial Samurai, who promises that all proceeds generated by the group’s site will be donated to charity.
The goal is simple: build traffic. Says Sam:
If you’re outside of the top 200,000, get in the top 200,000 within 6 months. . . . If you’re already in the top 200,000, get in the top 100,000. And if you’re already in the top 100,000, get in the top 50,000.
Funny’s Alexa ranking is at 212,477 today. It’s been rising slowly since I signed up for Alexa about ten days ago, although it’s off from April, when a large spike in traffic pushed the ranking into the 100,000s. (The lower the number, the higher your ranking.) I’d like to keep traffic up at a constant level in the “spike” range—the site cranked money during the two or three days the spike lasted. And every dollah Funny cranks is a dollah closer to freedom from those de rigueur freshman comp courses! 😉
A small mercy: The air-conditioning guy returned to the downtown house to fix the rattle in the motor he’d installed in the swamp cooler. As you may recall, they clipped us to the tune of $500 for that job, something that frosted my cookies because the guy showed up when neither of us was there (the roommate was in the offing) and they didn’t bother to call and let us know how much it was going to be.
Although a swamp cooler is vastly cheaper to operate than refrigeration, $500 is way, way more than the cooler will save on electric bills this summer. If M’hijito had known how much they intended to charge, he would have told them not to do it.
Then about three days after the work was done, the thing developed a rattle. So I called and bellyached. They said they’d send him back to fix it, free of charge. Last I heard, the thing was working OK.
Sooo… Friday evening along comes a bill in the mail: $85.
Ever notice how announcements that agitate you always arrive on Friday, about an hour after the close of business hours?
In-freaking-furiating! The main reason I’m $94 in the hole right now is that the dentist and the air-conditioning guy joined forces to clean out my checking account last month.
So I called and pointed out that they didn’t leave me with enough cash to pay this bill, and besides, they said they’d get the job done right without charging us for it.
She said, “Just void it!”
Done!
Whenever you have a question about a bill or—let’s be frank—get even a whiff of a possibility that you can work a better deal for yourself, A$K! Merchants do want to keep your business, and they often will try to give you a break if you have a good argument for it.
Frugal Scholar reminded me this morning that everyone has been urging me to take the unfortunate progressive glasses back to Costco and ask for a refund. Since I paid for them last November, I kinda doubt they’re going to do anything for me. But at her urging, I’ve decided to try it.
What can they do? Throw me out of the place? I doubt it.
The worst that will happen is they’ll tell me “no,” and then I’ll wander off to the cooler room and buy the bottle of orange juice I need.
{gasp}Maybe I should type this entire post in virtual red “ink.” Today is the seventh—fourteen more days to go until the current budget cycle resets—and I’m already $93.77 in the hole.
Augh, augh, and augh!
Well, two causes for this predicament:
1. I bought that Shark vacuum cleaner from Costco that I mentioned, after having mulled it over for several days. By the time the obnoxious 9.3% sales tax was added, the $158 selling price ballooned to $174.
It’s too late to return the clunky Eureka I bought from the Fry’s electronics last March. What a piece of junk! So that’s about $300 ultimately paid in search of a decent vacuum.
2. My car was way, way, way overdue for an oil change, tire rotation, safety check, and windshield wiper change. That trip racked up an $86 bill.
Lordie! The last time I had the car serviced was in August of 2009!!!!! Inexcusable. Plus the car has needed new windshield wipers for a year. They had reached the point where their only use was to mix dirt with water and smear it around like paint. Artistic, but hard to see through.
So, those two things pushed me into the red. The vacuum cleaner alone would’ve done it. Add the car service, and now I’m in the hole with two weeks to go and not enough food to last that long.
Last month was the first time this year I’ve run in the red on the discretionary budget. But it was huge: $1,600!
That notwithstanding, I still have some money in savings, and so there’s something left to pay for the car and the vacuum cleaner. But I can’t keep on drawing down savings to meet living expenses.
Ordinarily, a fair amount is left in each month’s nondiscretionary budget—money set aside to pay utilities, Medicare premiums, and long-term care insurance. But summer is now here. Yesterday was a 110-degree day, and it’ll be the same today, cooling to 106 Wednesday and Thursday. That won’t max out the air conditioning bill (the electric company walloped us with a hefty rate increase this spring, BTW), but I expect this month’s bill will be close to $200. Same with water: if you want anything in the yard to stay alive, you have to run the water. The watering system is now on its summer schedule—and I can tell you one thing for sure: drip watering is about as overrated in the economy department as the digital thermostat. The water bills go through the roof when that thing is running. Plus of course I have to refill the pool every day; it loses an inch a day to evaporation.
If the electric and water hit their maximum levels this month, I’ll have $2.59 left in the nondiscretionary fund come June 30.
All of this is happening, natch, when no income other than Social Security and a pittance from Fidelity is flowing in to the coffers. No word from the college about when they’re going to pony up the first payment on the stipend they say I’ll get for preparing the online course.
The problem with that is they’re making me schlep up to the college every week, and that runs up the gas bill. Eighty bucks down the drain there, and two more weeks to go. Just bought gas yesterday; the last fill-up was 12 days ago. So there’s an outside chance I might make it to the end of the budget cycle without pumping gas again…but not likely.
It’s impossible not to drive around this city. Today, for example, I have to deposit some checks for the S-corporation. The credit union is way to hell & gone up at 43rd and Thunderbird, a fourteen-mile round trip. The last time I tried mailing a deposit to the CU, using their self-addressed envelope, they lost the checks. It was over two weeks before the deposits cleared, just as I was about to call clients and tell them to cancel payment.
And a couple of days ago I went over to the downscale Albertson’s, which theoretically is within walking distance, to buy some salad to feed our bloggers’ group. They didn’t have the basic things I needed to make a very ordinary meal. Wanted some cherry tomatoes: the only ones they had were in plastic boxes, and in each box about half were shriveling up like raisins. So ended up having to drive seven miles, round trip, to the Safeway to buy salad stuff!
M’hijito gave me $22 to reimburse for dinner out a week ago. I can apply that toward groceries. Plus I have a few paper dollars stashed away from other reimbursements. Over the past year, I’ve been squirreling that money for these summer months, when I figured to run short on funds. But I’d expected that would happen in August.
