11/18/08

Today I haven’t done much. That’s pretty usual around here. I waste my time doing miscellaneous crap.

I went through my emails, replied to some from forever ago, spent a good hour entering contests and answering surveys. I’ve won quite a bit of stuff by entering contests including a $500 gift certificate to West Jet, books, dvds, basketball jerseys, blinds for our old apartment. Haven’t gone anywhere with the WJ g/c yet. It’s good until 2010 and I’m hoping to use it as a mini vacation after we get married… or maybe just go to Vegas with it TO get married! lol

Last week I did a survey which got me a $10 gift certificate to Chapters. I’m behind on most of my survey groups but occasionally you get one which will award you a monetary amount if you qualify; the rest of them give you points which you can redeem when you get some ridiculously high amount of them. I haven’t redeemed any points yet. I guess I keep doing them to get the occasional paid ones. Actually, today I found a couple of sites that promise paid surveys. They have Better Business Bureau labels so I’m hopeful.

Every little bit helps when trying to save for this wedding!

I saw an Oprah show recently about ways to save money and have since caught the coupon bug. Coupons work differently in Canada than in the US, I’ve found, but I’m making some progress finding and using relevant coupons. I’ve found some great sites offering lists of "freebies" too. Some people may think "what the hell am I going to do with all these tiny bottles of crap?!" but they come in handy when you can’t afford to buy shampoo one week. Not that we’ve been in that position – at least on the shampoo front. I like to stock up and it’s a rare occasion when we run out of something (other than perishables, of course). I still have 2 shampoos and 2 conditioners from when I bought a bunch of them YEARS ago for half price. My main problem is that we don’t really have a pantry or other place to store the extra items.

This week we’re going to refinance our loan at the bank to include a big car repair that needs to get done, some money to put towards the wedding and the $9-ishK that we owe my mom. She wants to retire and doesn’t want that large of an amount in her name, understandably.  We have a pretty fair range of monthly payment amounts that we can afford so I’m optimistic, even with this economic crisis. Dunno why I brought that up.

Such a boring entry but I’m going to try to write a little about ANYTHING every day. I got out of the journaling habit and it’s been detrimental to my health. I know I say that every time and then I disappear. Hopefully this time will be different.