2/5/08

Gratitude Journal 2/5/08

I am grateful for:
1. A quiet day with my girls. We didn’t go anywhere; we just stayed home and were together.
2. I’m not blacklisted after all. To make a long story short, I couldn’t figure out why I was never hired as a sub in the district that I taught in for 7 years. I gave it one more shot and called S-K again. She had no idea what happened and was extremely apologetic. I guess that I’ll be going to the training on the 15th so I can sub nearer to my house.
3. Crock pot meals. J had a meeting and didn’t get home until about 6:30. I decided to do a crock pot meal so I didn’t have to worry about cooking, and it was great to not have to try to cook while juggling both girls. Yay for meal planning!
4. Financial Planning. While I may not be able to join the gym like I was hoping, I’m so glad we sat down and planned out our budgets for the coming months. I now know how much extra I need to sub between now and the end of the year so we have enough to make it until through October, when I usually get my first pay check again.
5. Paying off debt. I am happy to admit that we are now the proud owners of two cars. Not special, you think? We finally own our two vehicles outright! We no longer have car payments!!! Yay!
6. Saving and planning. This may sounds silly to you, but I am proud of what we are doing. For my contracting, I get large lump-sum checks erratically spaced through out the school year. The last one was particularly large and instead of letting it sit in our checking account and be dwindled away, we have a plan. We deposited a large sum of it into a separate savings account that we just set up for it. It actually earns a great interest rate (4.25%) and it’s not as easily accessible as our checking account. (We were originally going to put it into a money market account or CD, but we found the rates to be terrible compared to this). We are giving ourselves a monthly “salary” from it and depositing all my new paychecks into it. So instead of spending the money I make, we’re saving it all and only withdrawing our “salary” each month. Since we decided we needed to do some things with some of the money (pay off car, furniture, credit card, start IRA, start college savings for the girls, start “Christmas account” so we have a separate account for Christmas presents), we’ll be short a bit in the end. (See #4). So now I’m doing more subbing and depositing that money straight into this account to sit while we just draw the scheduled “salary” each month.

Goals for tomorrow:
1. Sub
2. Work out after the girls go to bed.
3. Make Jana’s b-day invite & email it out.
4. Plan meal for Jana’s b-day.