financialliferaft.com

Ok.. It’s been a while since I’ve been on this blog… Although it seems to be getting alot of hits from people wanting to sell me stuff or tell me a crude joke…  Anyway…

I need to look at some serious work to this sight. Upgrading my spam filters… is close to the top.
One of the things that seems to be helping me out lately has been my applications of Gtd in my life.

Gtd thanks for getting things done.  I initially got the book from the public library and liked it so much, I had work buy me a copy.   Later the wife found another copy at a garage sale.
This book has helped me alot.  Basically a man without a plan is not a man…  That’s my spin not from Gtd.  Actually I think that’s the Joker from a very early Batman movie.

I’ve found gtd to be very helpful… More information can be found on wikipedia

One of my projects at the moment is to get a budget going.  Currently I’m trying out one of the templates I found at http://www.vertex42.com/ExcelTemplates/personal-budget-spreadsheet.html

Our family budget is getting squeezed beyond belief and is adding layers to our stress levels.    There has been no-choice in cutting expenses.
I’ve been fortunate in that, I work with a friend on my glide path to work.  So we’ve been alternating rides on the 25ish mile ride to work.    Actually, this has turned out to have some interesting side benefits that I had never anticipated.  One interesting benefit is that my wife no longer needs to listen to my boring work stories.  It a lot easier venting about work issues with someone on the drive to/from work instead of the office or worse yet at home.
There is some strange Euphoric feeling of sticking it to the man, by not consuming gasoline that normally would use that I haven’t completely figured out.
One of the things that happened on our car pool schedule is that my friend needed to go downtown one day a week instead of back home on the western suburbs.  I said no problem, I’ll bike it home.  He thought I was nuts.  I couldn’t believe that I haven’t tried this years ago.  I’ll get more into what I figured out on my next post.

I guess I should mention how to get your government rebate for a HDTV converter.
Here’s the link.

Btw.. I sort of mis-spoke regarding time is running out thing yesterday. It is for us, but not necessarily for you. My wife is the one who has been researching this project.  According to the wife, there is a 90 day life to the rebate coupon.  I believe that its limit 2 per household.  She had ordered up the coupons but hadn’t  found “the convertor” with the Gucci features she wanted.  The really nice ones are one listed on the net but apparently you can’t order them yet…  There is apparently a large variety of features to choose from.

Get you  $40 government re-bate on your HDTV converter. We happened to have ordered one off the net and fired it up yesterday. Our family never had the expense of cable, and for our internet we went from dial-up to the cheap DSL on our internet which for us at the moment works fine. About the only thing we what on commerical TV was American Idol and other than that it’s PBS. Since we got the HD-TV convertor fired up we went from 2 Pbs station to 6 and a bunch of stations we never picked up on rabbit ears before including a commerial kids station. For us, who went from analog-air ways this is a huge (almost free) step up from what we had before.. I suppose if you have this honking cable expense for hundreds of channels of nothing to watch this could be a step down, but its definately alot better than the old rabbit ears… 😉

Ok…. I think I’m off and to a slow start and running on financiallifeline.com
My goal has been to figure out to address the financial dew dew that I’m in, but so far I been trying to figure out how to get this web site up and running..  Yikes…. Not a good start good out of the gate start.
Well, I guess I should say something financial.  Hmm. Well… I’m maintaining my blog and website on a pc running Ubuntu Linux.   So what you ask?  I’m as window’s user at work and at home my preference has become Linux.  Its open source and best of all its free.
Ah shucks…. I guess I just blew  my chance for Bill and Melinda sending me some sheckels my way ;(