Begin Date: July 4, 2010
End Date: April 1, 2013
Items Completed: 26
Items that will not be Completed: 2
I’m 25% done with this list! WOOHOO! (Tomorrow will be 300/1001 days.)
I finished 4 things in April 2011:
1) Visit the Museum of Russian Art
2) Visit 20 new local restaurants/bars (we finished this up with Prairie Alehouse and Ngon Bistro.)
3) Rebuild my itunes library, since i lost it in the great hard drive/backup drive crash of 2010 (finding a couple mp3 cds, plus a few downloads, took care of everything Matt didn’t already have. hooray!)
4) Build a potato-growing bin
I added 1 thing to my ‘will not be completed’ list:
1) Spend only cash for a month and see if it affects my budget
I started this with the best of intentions on April 1. I used foldin’ money for most everything for a while (including gas, which was really weird). It wasn’t difficult at all. I did use my American Express card at Costco, because I like getting the miles, and I just transferred money from my cash account to the card afterwards. I also bought a few things online, so I had to transfer money for that as well. Matt thinks that’s cheating, but my position on it is basically that I’m getting a way better value for my money by doing it that way, and I’m not actually using money I don’t have, because it’s being taken out of cash spending. Regardless, it’s true that I did not spend only cash this month.
What I discovered by the first paycheck was that I actually spent more than usual, which was really surprising. I had the same amount of money to work with, and I figured I’d suddenly become more frugal because I don’t like using cash for purchases higher than $20 or so – I just use my debit card (which is effectively the same, I know). I didn’t really do anything out of the ordinary for the first half of the month that would cause me to spend more, either.
By the time the last weekend of April rolled around and we were in LA, I’d given up on this completely. It was an interesting venture and I learned a couple things (mainly that I already function on a cash basis most of the time anyway, via my debit card/spending account, and that sometimes it’s less advantageous to use cash, in the case of my AMEX card), but it doesn’t really fit into the way I do things. So I’m calling this one incomplete, as I don’t plan to attempt it again. That’s $50 more in my pocket anyway, right?
Items currently in progress:
1) Get married (got my wedding dress, we sent our save-the-dates, and our website and registries are up and running!)
2) Lose 40 pounds (15/40)
3) Do Project365 again (started 1/1/11: photos here)
4) Have date night with Matt once a month (we had several date nights, actually!)
5) Re-learn Spanish (we started classes on April 20)
6) Finish my travel journals on runawaytruck.com within 60 days of getting home from a trip (posted san diego and las vegas)
7) Put $20 towards debt payoff for each completed task on this list, and $50 for each incomplete item ($80 for the 4 items in April, $50 for the one incomplete item: $620 total)