Sunday, the day of....

... cramming lots of information into my head about various things. And while I do give in to multiple naps in a day on Sundays, I still don't consider that much "rest".

Today I finished the non-financial-related book I was reading, namely, When I Say No, I Feel Guilty by Dr. Manuel J Smith. On a personal growth/dealing with difficult conversational situations level, this book was great, however, which is why I mention it again, here. I'm probably going to annoy a few people in the next little while by using the "systematic assertiveness techniques" taught in that book ;)

I have played Cashflow 202 eGame against computer opponents 2 times today, and got my bootie kicked both times. The second time around I was a Doctor, earning some $11k/month with $8k worth of expenses per month... I went bankrupt on that game, because I kept on hitting doodads that were not only expensive but had recurring costs.

I've started to read another book - one that I ordered from Amazon along with The Dollar Crisis, which I heard about first through www.richdad.com/forums. It's called The Coming Collapse of the Dollar (and how to profit from it) by James Turk and John Rubine. Since I have decided I probably won't have enough knowledge to feel comfortable doing much investing until the markets I'm educated in (stocks, real estate) are going down, I figure this type of "how to make a profit" book is a good one for me to read. I'll write a wee book report on it after I'm done reading.

I bought a couple of newspapers yesterday - Saturday papers, which are the most full of classifieds and things of those nature. I went through one of the papers this afternoon, putting the parts of the paper I don't care about into recycling, and pouring over that which I'm interested in. I pulled out the 3-4 pages that have rooms for rent and houses for rent or sale, and tucked the information away. I figure I'll do this once a month or so, and in a year or three I'll have an interesting pile of information about what the local real estate market has been doing in the mean time.

I'm about to cuddle down for another snooze, then dinnertime will be upon me and I will make some spaghetti and enjoy that.

Things I've got scheduled/to do this week to take care of business are:

1. Financial advisor guy visits on Tuesday afternoon. I have to make some corrections on the nearly-complete May and June "financial report card" spreadsheets, then complete April's information with the new corrected format. My initial goal with him is to figure out a basic and a more detailed way of showing where our money is going - I have a non-detailed spreadsheet I found online that I like the looks of, if it's functional and not missing important things. My detailed spreadsheet welcomes improvement because it's not all that detailed. Some of that is because of our spending habits, however. My second goal is to figure out some ways to reduce interest charges while working to reduce our existing debt over the next 6 months. I believe just being aware of where the money is going will help curb our bad spending habits enough that we don't have to review that for 6 months or so. However, we do have a $4500 re-shingling we need to get done before the snow flies again, looming over us.
2. Gotta decide on a quote from the 3 tree trimming companies who visited 2 wks ago and make an appt - we have trees in the back yard that are growing in amongst some cable TV lines. We want to get that trimmed up so it won't bother us for another 3-5 yrs. The front is fine, and our trees don't need pruning.
3. Call handyman or three, get 'em to come over and quote on bathroom repairs + shelving unit fixes + whatever else their eyes spy. We have house repairs that need to be done, which is one thing, but ultimately I'd like to find a handyman or three that I could depend on to repair my rental real estate in 5 years time. These handymen won't know that for a while, however. For now I'm just looking to maintain my own home when things fall apart.

That is all for now.

Jill