Done To Zen

PT Money shares what some of his readers are saving money for. Made me think about what short-term goals I have. For the rest of 2008, I would say I’m saving money for my 401K and Roth IRA.

Can I Get Rich on a Salary (among others) posts advice from the richest person alive on how to become rich. Simple, common-sense advice (but then again, I wouldn’t have expected anything else).

The Simple Dollar talks about how to find your least important bill and seeing if you can’t perhaps eliminate it even if you can afford it. Going through his exercise, I figured out that my least important bill is gym membership. And, yes, I can live without it, and, yes, I cancelled it, just an hour before reading the article, in fact. :-)

Millionaire Mommy Next Door says it’s entirely possible to get FDIC insurance for your money even if you have more than $100K.

Quest for a Million is finding it hard to not touch his portfolio. I don’t have the urge to do something about my portfolio, but it still sucks big time when every contribution I make to my 401K disappears by the time I make the next contribution. But I just keep reminding myself I’m buying shares at a low price, which is a good thing. Hopefully, I can look back in ten years and laugh about it.

Blueprint for Financial Prosperity has a nice table on projected income tax brackets for 2009.

Bespoke Investment Group talks about how the current yield for three-month treasuries is an unbelievable $4 per year for $10,000 in investment. This certainly sucks and is one of the reasons I haven’t purchased any treasuries yet despite finally getting my account fully authorized.

New York Times reports that a shareholder at the now-defunct Lehman Brothers lost $6 million in just one night. Yikes. My paltry losses don’t seem so bad anymore.

MoneyNing shares the story of a coworker who apparently can’t afford her house but spends around $1320 every month on unnecessary things. The most interesting part of the post was how much people spend on utilities. $600 for electricity bill??? I freaked out when I got a $70 bill (my house isn’t a mansion, but it isn’t a matchbox, either). He says his last electricity bill was $13.01. My last bill was $21.60.

Charles over at The Kirk Report thinks that bailouts are band-aids, and I couldn’t agree more. The more I think about it, the more I feel that the government should just step back and let the market crash and work itself back up the right way.

DashOver shows us the stock market graveyard. It hurts my head just to look at the charts. Are any of them good investments to make, now that they are trading south of embarrassing?

An article from Slate on Merrill Lynch avoided the fate of Lehman Brothers compares the two CEOs and how one of them played his cards right and the other took the company to the cleaners.

I recently found One Hundred Pushups, a site that has the spectacularly singular focus of training people to do 100 pushups in 6 weeks. I’ve never been able to do a full push up in my life. Either my arms are too weak and can’t handle the weight of my body or … my arms are too weak and can’t handle the weight of my body. I’ve never managed to bend my arms more than 10%.

I’ve been doing push-ups pretty consistently for the past couple of months, so I’m getting better at them. I can now do 6 “quarter” push-ups. I stay on my knees and can only go 25% of the way down. If you can believe it (yes, you can), I was worse before, so I feel like the queen of the world.

But I want to do more, I want to do better. I found out about One Hundred Pushups via Get Fit Slowly, where there’s a six-week plan to go from wherever you are to 100 pushups:

If you’re serious about increasing your strength, follow the six week training program and you’ll soon be on your way to completing 100 consecutive push ups!

Think there’s no way you could do this? I think you can! All you need is a good plan, plenty of discipline, and about 30 minutes a week to achieve this goal!

30 minutes a week to go from 0 to 100? It was a no-brainer. I signed up maybe 10 seconds after I found the site.

I will keep you posted on how it’s going.

It’s halfway through June, so time to take a look at how I fared this month.

Things I did right

1. Opened an emergency fund
2. Saved an unexpected $30.99 I got in affiliate commission.
3. Cancelled a $50 subscription and setup automatic transfer from checking to savings for that amount every month.
4. Opened an ING Orange savings account
5. Decided to stop eating out for a month
6. Started this blog
7. Called 20 businesses for freelancing opportunity (none so far)
8. Tracked and wrote down all my assets and liabilities so I know where I stand
9. Created a plan for my net worth over the next 6 months
10. Mailed in the check to pay off the home association dues for the past three months (something I’ve been procrastinating on for whatever reason for the past, well, three months)
11. Decided to stop using credit card for a month
12. Applied for something mysterious that’s going to give me two to three thousand dollars in the future
13. Registered on a couple of different online paid survey sites (made about $1.50 so far)

Things I could have done better

1. Practice more of the things I read
2. Stop trying to do everything and instead focus on few things (to increase income)
3. Apply for scholarships
4. Do something productive during the extra time I have now that I am waking up at 4AM
5. Keep going when 20 people said no, they don’t need any website work, thank you very much
6. Confront fear of real estate investing
7. Stop complaining, whining, feeling depressed, giving up control

Ratings

Objectively-speaking: 7 out of 10
Emotionally-speaking: 3 out of 10