The Dog Ate My Wallet

The Dog Ate My Wallet

Personal Finance in a World of Excuses

Category Archive: Organization

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Taking Control

I have now been unemployed for longer than I have ever been since I was an undergraduate. I am doing my best to learn from the experience the same way I would learn from other experiences. One of the first things I am learning is that I need to set a schedule for myself. My life works better if I have a schedule. Getting into a routine makes me more productive overall. As part of havingread more…

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I Am Bad At This

Today is day 3 of my administrative leave. I know that’s much time, but I have already come to the conclusion that I am bad at this. I had this idea for how I was going to manage my time, for everything I was going to get done, and so far, not happening. Blog posts have gone up late. I’ve done very little of my Coursera course work. I need to do a lot more studyingread more…

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Home Inspection

Today was the home inspection for our foster license/home study. For those who are wondering, yes, we passed. We are essentially done with everything we can do on our own at this point. We have to wait for J’s background check to come back (they messed it up and had to redo it). Then, our social worker completes her report. She calls us in to review it. She submits it to her boss and then submitsread more…

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Intentional Planning

I spent today in an all-day meeting, as we were trying to map out the future state of one of the units within our department. This included revamping the job descriptions, deciding if we need two or three levels of analysts, and do we need more supervisors, admin and analytical assistants, or other support staff. The goal is to prepare the unit to handle not just the work in today’s world, but the work we knowread more…

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Getting Closer

Because I know you’ve all by dying to know how getting our home ready for the foster licensing has been going, today you’re getting an update. We’ve made progress. I’m not certain anyone besides us can tell exactly how much progress we’ve made because the house, the downstairs and baby’s room, especially, is still a disaster. I think our basement isn’t currently fire safe because we have so many boxes stacked in passageways that it wouldread more…

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Shred!

I had meant for today’s blog post to be about short sales, as my mother is currently going through one. But that’s a kind of long and somewhat complicated post, and I just did not have time to write it today. So instead, you are getting this reminder to do regular shredding of your financial documents. Avoid Identity Theft- Shred Your Documents In cleaning and organizing, we are going through all the random paper we haveread more…

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Spending Discomfort

Going Big and Small: I have no problems with spending large amounts of money on large products. I’m talking in the thousands of dollars for dramatic results- like getting flood remediation work done on our basement. Sure it cost a lot, but our basement hasn’t flooded all winter. We did get a little water seeping up through the floor last night after a mini-typhoon hit our neighborhood, but it’s in a spot where there was noread more…

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Move Along, Nothing to See Here

For my own sanity, my current organizational goals must focus on the upstairs. If I even start thinking about our basement, I’ll become to overwhelmed to do anything. We finished cleaning out the MIL’s apartment on Saturday. Besides three different trips to Goodwill, and two trips to Value Village that included two large bags of stuffed animals, 140 VHS tapes, and some furniture, we have added a significant number of items to our basement. Some things,read more…