Recent and Uneventful

Nothing much has been going on lately so there hasn't been anything to blog about. I've been experimenting with my mortgage payment for the past month paying it weekly instead of monthly. I read an article on the internet a while ago that you'd save a lot in interest if you split up your monthly payment into 4 small payments and paid it every week. You wouldn't pay any more than normal but you'd pay your house off quicker because your balance would be smaller each week and therefore, you'd be paying less in interest. Considering I pay over $1000 of my payment to interest each month, I figured I'd give this experiment a go. Ugh. It makes me sick just thinking about interest!!! Anyways, there's an option to make biweekly payments through Wells Fargo but not weekly so I've just been making them online for now. Another financial pet peeve that have been on my mind is taxes. Why do we get taxed on our State Tax Refund?!! Seriously?!! I was pretty peeved about it when I found out a few weeks ago. I started telling Chris that we were going to stop paying taxes throughout the year and then just pay them at the end of the year. My crazy plan was to just figure out how much of our paychecks get taken out each month and then put it in savings. Since we are pretty responsible with money, it would stay there so that we could pay at the end of the year and we would earn interest. No refund, no double taxing. Right? This crazy idea is still in the works since you don't really want to mess with the IRS. Ideas anyone? Maybe we'd do this just on State taxes since it's the only refund you get taxed on, not federal.

In other news, Chris has to go to Denver for 4 weeks for work. Luckily, they aren't consecutive weeks and they'll be flying him home on the weekends. I guess they figured it would be cheaper to pay for a ticket home than to pay for his expenses on the weekends. I'm planning on flying out with him for a week while he's there. We figured it would be a cheap trip since we wouldn't have to pay for our room or rental car while we are there and they would pay for his meals. Too bad I'll be stuck in the room while he's at work. I'll have to bring a lot of books to read. Does anyone know of anything fun to do while we're there. I browsed online and it doesn't look like we'll be able to do anything cool since Chris will be working until 5. So far I've just been thinking about where I want to eat while I'm there. I didn't see any listings from Diners, Drive ins and Dives but Man Vs Food did an episode there.

Other vacation plans this year are up in the air. At first it was Europe, then Hawaii and now who knows. I keep thinking about what it will cost and then think about what I could do with that money instead. Like buy a whole new wardrobe. Ha ha! We've been planning on replacing the carpet in the living room with hardwood floors for a while, among other things.

After eating what I want for the past several months, I'm back to the 1200 calorie diet. So far it's been a week and I've lost 5 lbs. Success! The good news is that I've pretty much maintained my weight from last time so I've truly lost 5 more lbs. Not gained 10 lbs over the past few months and then lost them again. I'm not as strict as I was before where I wrote everything I ate down and calculated calories. I've been loosely calculating and not really writing it down. Since I did all that before, I don't really have to figure calories, I have a general idea of what to eat during the day. Now, if I can only get my butt to exercise. ;)

Other than all that, I've been watching a lot of TV off Netflix. Mostly Heroes. I'm trying to put our wireless router to good use. ha ha. Since I've been parked in front of the TV, there hasn't been a lot of reading lately. I'll have to wait until Denver to catch up. Seems like I can only handle one obsession at a time. Reading, internet or TV. Right now it's TV but at least I'm not on facebook that much anymore. The poor dogs only get theirs updated once every few days now.