Category Archives: Humor

Sometimes Life Throws You A Curveball Example

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I had big intentions Friday, but sometimes life throws you a curveball and you have to do whatever you have to do to keep your head above the water!

Timeline of my big Friday Plans to improve the www.Moneyreasons.com website

  • 4:00 – I get off work, I have some big plan for revamping pieces of my website tonight!  I can’t wait to sink my teeth into it after dinner!  The kids are home, they want to play with the turtles (we have 3 very small turtles, 1 is only 2 weeks old).  Don’t tell my wife, but I like them too 😉
  • 4:45 – The wife and I talk about dinner and the plans  for the weekend in general.  I’m still exited about revamping pieces of my website, but we talk for about 45 minutes.  It’s cool, though… It’s still all good.
  • 5:30 – My boss calls me, he need me to remote into work at 10:30pm to work on something.  That’s hours away, I’m cool with that.
  • 5:45 – Time to get Pappa John’s pizza (yum it was good)!
  • 6:30 – Finally I’m on the computer, First I try to put twitter icon back on, but the graphics don’t line up well.  I get tired so I shelf it for another day.  I start thinking about drawing something for Saturdays post on the www.moneyreasons.com website.   I wonder if I can still draw as well as I could when I was a teenager? Hmmm.
  • 7:30 – I’m playing with my Banner Header now.  I have a graphic, but it’s only the title words “Money Reasons“, I wonder if anyone realized that I changed it a week ago?  Another Hmmm.
  • 8:15 – Oh no!  Something that’s not suppose to happen to a seasoned techie like me, happens!!!  I inadvertently, save my header code over my style.css code… Aughh!  My theme is no longer recognized and my site looks horrible, panic sets in!!!
  • 9:00 – I’m still fighting this issue.  My website still comes up, but without the theme…  It looks horrible!
  • 9:20 – I finally get it back, but I lose all the work I did on the banner earlier.  Grrr.
  • 9:30 – After poking around I’m satisfied that my website is working again!  Whew.  My daughter wants to me to read her a bedtime story.  So we start to read… Zzzzz.
  • 10:45 – I fell asleep!  My wife wakes me up saying I thought you had to work at 10:30?
  • 10:50 – I scramble to log into the systems at work, ready to apologize to the guy that I was going to help.
  • 10:51 – I connect to the VPN where I work!  I start to IM the guy (POW)
  • 10:52 – I get disconnected from the VPN where I work!
  • 10:53 – I realize the problem is on my side!  I call my ISP and they said “Yeah, we’re replacing a piece of hardware on the routers down here because one of them is acting flaky“.  But I need the connect to work, I exclaim.  They say oh it should take no more than a few minutes.
  • 11:35 – Aliens must have abducted my ISP support because that few minute took almost 45 minutes!!!  I hope the aliens were more gentle than I would have been… or do I?
  • 11:40 – I reconnect back to the VPN of my day job and do what needed to be done.  Now I think about the humorous article I wanted to post for this coming Saturday.
  • 11:50 – I’m too frustrated and it’s too late to do anything other than complain.
  • Now –  Well, the post isn’t the funny post I hoped it would be, but it is interesting and shows how when we plan for something, it doesn’t always happen the way we hoped it would play out..

Have a Great Weekend!  Life is funny sometime!

If you have a similar story please do tell!

-MR

Frugal Sins Of A Personal Finance Blogger

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I’m consider myself a Frugal Blogger, and I am mostly, but I have my frugal sins that I commit.  And now, I would like to confess some of them, please try not to hate me!  (lol)

Frugal Sin #1:

I’m like Neo in “The Matrix” when it comes to not following David Bach’s “the latte factor” advice, …the rules do not apply to me!  Or at least you would think that is what I believe.  I have a McDonalds latte at least 4 days out of the week.  On top of McDonald’s latte’s, at least four times a month, I sneak in a Starbucks latte in too!  I also go to the local cafe shop and drink a few of their lattes per month.

This sin cost me about $15.00 extra a week, ($60.00 monthly).

Frugal Sin #2:

I’m currently not carpooling!  I have a buddy at work  that I’m sure I could carpool with again (we have in the past, when gas prices went over $3.00 a gallon), but I enjoy my alone time driving to work too much to give it up.  When I drive with my buddy, I feel like I have to entertain him, but I like listening to audiobooks, music, NPR, and other things.  Sometimes I even think about blogging topics.

This sin also cost me an another $15 dollars to my weekly expenses ($60 monthly).

Frugal Sin #3:

And what may be the most outragious sin of all… We still have a landline phone!  We have 2 cell phones, and a gmail voice account… and yet we still have a landline with Verizon?  My wife wants it just in case we need to call 911, but it’s not really necesary!  I wonder at what point in time, I will start to get embarrassed by the phone?  Maybe when we have company over, I’ll throw a blanket over our landline phones, or will I grab them and throw them in the utility room?  Oh the shame…

This sin also cost me an another $6 dollars to my weekly expenses ($24 monthly).

So my frugal sins only cost me almost $150 dollar a month, but still that’s $150 dollars that I could be saving for investments!

Please don’t tell my mom…

Would you like to confess some of your frugal sins here?  I think you’ll feel better if you put those nasty sins out on the table and in the open!

-MR

Minimalist vs Misers, Money Fight Matchup #2

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Well, it seems the Minimalists already have a new challenger!  With the freegans beat during the last matchup, the new challengers “The Misers” have issued some serious smack calling the minimalists “Baby Nothings“.

So, let’s GET IT ON:

Who is the Greenest of Them All?

After a tough fight from both camps, this battle is won by the Misers!  You see, the minimalist, while taking a vow of trying to buy as little as possible has been perfectly countered by the Miser’s level of cheapness and using what they find (they recycle).  So from a “which group is the more green” perspective, the Misers actually win this one, but it’s not entirely because they try to be… no, it’s because they are too cheap to do otherwise.

Who has the Healthier Lifestyle?

Another tough battle (most misers live to be pretty old), but the minimalist pulls ahead (barely) on this one.  Part of it is their minimalist lifestyle, but part of it is the wisdom they have around health these days.  However, we only head about the wise minimalist, I’m sure there are plenty that are living on ramen noodles, day in and day out…

Which group has the potential to make more money?

This is where the fight becomes both ugly and unfair!  The misers are for the mostly part rich, while the minimalist are an unknown factor.  So this is like winning the fight by default since the misers are rich already.  If they need to use their incredible savings, they have access to it.

So the winner of this Money matchup goes to “The Misers”! 

This was a close call because a lot of the minimalist can evolve over time into Misers too, if they aren’t careful!  So it’s entirely possible for a “Baby Nothing” to evolve to a “Rich Nothing” if they are not extremely careful!

This fight was a big of a shocker to me, especially with respect to the similarities between the two.

Not all misers live the way the media represents them…  These two groups are very similar in many ways!  The minimalist being the younger version of the older, more wealthy misers.

I know that minimalism is the newest fad but what do you think?  Is the minimalist life style for you?  

-MR