Week #49 - It's begining to look a lot like Christmas...

hey everyone... I'm back on schedule (assuming that I remember to post this Friday morning) so that's kind of nice. As I'm starting to type this I'm still trying to figure out what to talk about. I know I said I would tell you about my 'Cyber Monday' shopping, but to be honest I didn't take advantage of any real sales. I did order a bunch of stuff, but it was just because I finally figured out some stuff to get a few people for Christmas.

I can tell you that I saved $30 on an Amazon purchase that I was going to make anyway. I added all the things I needed to my Amazon 'Shopping Cart' and when I went to check out it told me that I could apply for the Amazon Rewards Credit Card and if I was approved and I used it I would get $30 off my purchase. There is not much I won't try doing to save $30, but all I had to do was enter the standard info you need for a credit application and wait about 30 seconds for the approval. Then when I finished my check out it took the $30 off the final price. Not a bad deal at all! Amazon offers free shipping if you spend up to a certain amount of money, but if you don't want to spend that much you can sign up for 'Amazon Prime' for free for 30 days and as a member of 'Amazon Prime' you will get free 2nd day shipping on all orders no matter what the total spent is. So take advantage of that too, just make sure you remember to cancel your membership before the 30 days runs out or they will charge you $60.00 for the year.

I thought of something else that I have not mentioned at all in this blog. I like to play poker, really just Texas hold 'em. I really like to play, but I'm cheap and don't like to lose money so I don't really play for 'big' money. I have played in a casino two times and lost about $50-$60 each time and I left as mad as a 'normal' person would be if they had lost $5000! I do play pretty regularly with some guys at work during our lunch break. Each person puts in $5.00 and gets 20 washers, which means each washer is worth .25 cents. I like playing and $5.00 is far from 'big money' but the problem is that two of the guys that play everyday don't care about the money at all and they will raise all in on almost every hand no matter what cards they have which makes it very hard to play at the table. I complain and say I wont play anymore, but I always go back. I keep track on my calendar about if I played and how much I won or lost each day. I did a review the other day and as of today I have played poker 104 times (102 at work and 1 with some friends at home) and I am negative $26.00 for the year. As much as I hate to lose money I don't think that's to bad since I got a lot of entertainment out of playing and $26.00 would barely be enough for two movie tickets.

Last thing I will mention this week is a reminder about two paychecks that I got earlier this year. The paychecks I got on August 9th and November 22nd were 'extra' checks because those months had five weeks. I still have both those checks uncashed and not deposited set aside to do my Christmas shopping. I will be depositing both checks this week since I did some online shopping and I have to pay my credit card this week to avoid any interest. I will however be getting a $50.00 'cash back' bonus with my next statement which is nice!

Ok... so on to this weeks income. I got a paycheck for $563.07 with $35.70 going to my 401k. The reason the check is a little less than usual is because we had a power outage at work last week and I left 3.5 hours early instead of sitting in the dark all day. Since this is the first paycheck of December I will be putting the whole thing in my checking account to pay some bills. I did make my $20.00 vacation transfer, but that's all for this week. I have some cans, but I didn't have time to return them yet so that might count towards next weeks saving. Here's the wrap up...

Here is the week 49 wrap up:
$35.70 to my 401K
$20.00 to the vacation fund

Which makes the 2013 totals:
$1730.18 in my 401K
$980.00 in the vacation fund
$109.90 in the piggy bank
$700.00 in the quarterly loan payment account
$288.87 in my vet bill savings
$2277.41 in my money market
$1877.40 in my car account

For this weeks bonus I'll tell you about a couple of deals I saw. For people that drink a lot of coffee, Dunkin Donuts is offering a travel mug that holds a medium coffee and costs $2.49. When you buy it you can get it filled for free, but then every refill after that until the end of February only costs you .99 cents. The catch is that the .99 cent refills are from 2:00pm and later, so this deal is really only good for people that drink coffee all day and not just morning coffee drinkers.
 

This next deal is one I saw at a local restaurant chain called Chelos, but I know a lot of places do this during the holidays. For every $50 gift card you buy, you get an additional $10 card. The people at Chelos actually offer to put it all on one card so the last two times we went there for dinner I went to the reception desk before our check came and I bought a $50 (+$10) gift card and then used it to pay the bill. That's simple math of getting free money that you were going to spend anyway! Keep an eye on places you go regularly and stock up on gift cards because they usually only have offers like this around major holidays!

As always please check out the Facebook page and post up any holiday deals you see or hear about so we can all take advantage of the savings!!