What Noisy Cats Are We

Okay, so I haven’t posted in a while and I’ll start doing that soon now that I’ve decided that my LJ site shouldn’t be my primary blog.

So anyway, went to see The Strangers last night at the Cleveland Circle Cinema.  Not a good movie, but scared the crap out of me.  If you really enjoy the tense, about to have a heart attack feeling for an hour and a half straight, check it out.  It has less of a storyline as The Descent, and a lot less gore, but that’s the type of SURPRISE scare that I can compare it to.

Nice little place over in W. Newton. Check it out!

I’ve been trying to bake a simple bread on and off for months.  I’m new to baking, and I have a broken oven.  (Long story, and I’m sure the subject of another post, but more or less the temperature needs to be manually controlled.)

That said, I FINALLY found a simple enough, well explained recipe for basic bread that actually worked.  I managed to not kill the yeast yet somehow come up with a bread that costs very little but tastes great.  I’ll try another loaf tonight and take pics.  I brought it into work today and a couple co-workers complimented me, and not just in a ‘well, you tried’ kind of way.

Here’s a link to the recipe: http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2007/11/04/homemade-bread-cheap-delicious-healthy-and-easier-than-you-think/.  I actually really like this blog and will add it to my blogroll.  Rock.

I’m sure this is common knowledge but just in case, here’s some useful info:  You can reduce the interest rate on your Direct Loan from the US Department Of Education by .25% if you just sign up for them to auto-draft your checking or savings account every month for the payment!  It sounds like a small amount but a quarter point over time adds up, and this blog is partially about watching every penny.

I just did the sign-up and it’s really easy.  I’m sure you can do it over the phone, but I did it by logging onto the Direct Loan website and going through the screen to add my checking account info.  They said to continue paying normally (I use BoA’s BillPay service online) until I recieve a notice in the mail.

Easy to do, and a quick way to save some money.

p.s.  Don’t do this if you carry such a low balance on your checking or savings account that you’ll risk overdrafting if you forget about this auto-pay!

I used to talk about how great CoinStar is and how it made turning in your coins such a breeze.  I used CoinStar for years and always thought they did a good job at making people create $$ out of their spare change.  Then a couple of months ago I had an epiphany: Spare change is $$ already!  It’s not like it’s made into money by being filtered through the CoinStar machine!  CoinStar simply takes your money, moves it through a machine, and takes 9-10% of it away from you!  You’re LOSING money by using CoinStar.

Now, if your life is seriously too busy for you to sit down while you’re watching TV or something at night and roll your own coins, then this blog entry is for you.  In fact, this whole blog is probably not for you.  But if you DO have the time, then simply spending it rolling your coins and depositing them at your bank manually (we’ll get into what happens if you have an online bank only later…) lets you keep ALL of your spare $$!  No more lost money due to laziness.

Of course you probably don’t have any of those coin sleeves that your parents had in droves in the junk drawer at home.  But I found out today that if you ask nicely, your bank will just give them to you!  I have an old checking and savings account at Wainwright Bank and stopped in their Central Square, Cambridge branch during lunch today.  The teller was very nice and gave me a ton of rolls (tubes, sleeves, whatever you want to call them) for free.

I know that losing 9-10 cents on the dollar is not a big amount at all when we’re talking about small numbers, but it all adds up over time.  The point of my Watch Every Penny blog is just that, watch EVERY penny.  As long as being frugal does not take up too much of your time or affect your lifestyle much, a lot of the things I’ve been doing are simply a matter of changing wasteful financial habits.

That said, I’m gonna be rolling about $50 in change this evening.

Side note: Since I switched banks from Wainwright to Bank Of America, I have been charged $1 / month on my Wainwright savings account.  I found out today that I needed a minimum of $10 in that account to avoid being charged.  The bank customer service lady was nice enough to remove the two months of fees for me and I’ll shove $10 in the account just to keep it open for a while.  I love this bank, they just couldn’t do everything that I need done at BoA, and they aren’t national in case I move out of the Boston area.  If you’re looking for a great, simple, no hassle, fee bank and you live in Cambridge or Boston, please check them out!  I have nothing but good things to say about Wainwright.

I LOVE Yelp!  I try to review as many things as possible there, and I have gotten some great recommendations from the site.  You can see my latest reviews on the left hand sidebar of this blog, actually.

That said, I went to The Union last night over in Newton Center and wrote a very brief review of the place here:  http://www.yelp.com/biz/union-street-restaurant-newton-centre#hrid:mboIYPSWFZSv09vPsj1LZw

I’ve used a few different IM programs over the years, starting with AOL IM and ICQ almost a decade ago.  I now have accounts on multiple IM networks and got tired of running multiple IM programs.  I’m on a PC, and I have tried Trillian, Gaim, and others.  The one I’ve found to work the best and make my machine not die (*ahem* AIM and your memory hogging annoyingness..) is Pidgin.  It’s little, it’s simple, and it works with all my accounts without a problem.  It was brought to my attention this morning that a new version has been released, so I figured I’d post about briefly.  Check it out!

In an effort to put more $ toward the new home theater fund, I sold off the PS2 yesterday.  I managed to get $75 for the system with two games and one controller.  It was in relatively good condition, and the only thing we used it for was to watch DVD’s.  I can count on one hand the amount of times it was used to play games with.

I figured it was a good thing to let go of because we can always buy a new (used) one for cheap if the need to PS2 game arises, and it was only going to lose value while sitting around the apartment.  It was taking up space, and as you will see by further banal posts, I’m trying to get rid of some of the various unused and unnecessary junk around the house.

Goodbye, PS2.  You got us through four seasons of Six Feet Under, two seasons of Carnivale, three seasons of Deadwood, and countless other random shows and movies

Postscript: Anyone want to buy an Atari 2600 system?  I’m selling mine - complete with games!

I thought it would be a good idea to take one of my unused domains, brandonvogel.com, and monetize it by using GoDaddy’s CashParking service. Ends up it’s been costing me $4.00 per month and I’ve gotten exactly nothing out of it. I’m canceling it today and will just put up a bunch of Amazon and Google ads for the lack of something better to do at the moment.

Right now I’m trying to put together my own little personal finance blog, called Watch Every Penny. It’s focused on all my personal finance decisions, including even the little ones. I’m trying to eliminate even the smallest of bank fees and stuff. I just realized recently that earning something like 3% on a savings account doesn’t matter one bit if I’m paying a $6.50 monthly fee for a credit card or the $4.00 a month to GoDaddy for their CashParking service.

Right now, I’m just starting out on a better financial ground, and I’ve spent years squandering my money on bank fees and surcharges and everything. I’ll get into that at some point on the blog. That said, I’m trying to make every penny count right now.  Some year soon, I’ll be happy to not care about the little charges when I have more money to play around with.  Right now though, I need to make responsible decisions regarding both spending and saving.

I’m off to GoDaddy….

More or less this movie creeped me the hell out! I have not been so creeped out since High Tension. It’s a story of a group of six or so adventurous women who set out on a spelunking expedition. Soon they are in over their heads due to the manipulation of one of the girls, and have found themselves lost and their friendships splintering. Furthermore: they are not alone in the dark, scary, spaces.

The movie is a little more layered than just a plain thriller, and that keeps it interesting. It gave me nightmares, and that’s not an easy thing to do. Anyway, rent it, buy it (hint - Amazon Link below!), NetFlix it, or borrow it from your neighbor. Watch it late it night with all the lights off and be prepared to scare the living crap out of your couchmate when you scream like a girl when surprised once or twice throughout the movie.