jimsjournal
| Cash, check or charge? -- 02/08/04 |
jimsjournal |
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This episode's title comes from the theme of this week's Sunday Brunch: 1. Cash, check or charge? Usually cash or charge, very rarely check. (Nancy tends to take care of the bills that require sending checks, so I may go week after week without writing a check. When I do write one it tends to be a check to be mailed in with a race application.) I guess it depends on how much I'm spending and how much cash I have with me. I usually use a debit card in the supermarket and probably a credit card for pay-at-the-pump gasoline. 2. Who or what do you spend most of your money on? The mortgage is the biggest regular monthly expenditure. Then groceries. Then communications (i.e., land line, cable internet, tv cable, five cell phones). Of course with two kids in college, September and January have pronounced spending hits... and the insurance on four vehicles with two of the drivers being college age comes to a fair amount also. (No... it's a painful amount.) 3. How often do you shop for yourself? You mean personal stuff (not food or gasoline, etc.)... hmmm, it all depends. I placed an order with amazon.com yesterday, both personal and work-related. I was looking at a LandsEnd catalog and at a couple of seed catalogs earlier today and I will probably send in a seed order sometime this week. Oh, you mean physically go to an actual bricks & mortar store looking to buy something for myself? I can't remember.... Well, I did go through an OfficeMax a couple of weeks ago, pricing telephone headsets. And I went to that same OfficeMax at the beginning of January to buy a 2004 refill for my DayRunner. Oh, and I bought some socks and underwear two or three months ago. 4. One television commercial says the average American has 14 credit cards... are you average, above average or below average? Fourteen? How could anyone accumulate fourteen credit cards? So, I guess that makes me below average. I carry (in addition to a corporate AmEx card for business travel) a Discover card (Nancy loves that cash back feature) and a Visa card (for places that don't take Discover... and which gives me bonus coupons good at L.L. Bean). I also have a MasterCard but I don't carry it, it just sits in a drawer. We use them for convenience, not as a means of borrowing money to buy something we can't afford. I figure that it does not make sense to buy things that I couldn't afford to pay for. Yeah, okay, so houses are different, so I have a mortgage. 5. If you could take one paycheck and just have fun with it, what would you do? There's always a use for a paycheck. Oh, okay, that's not playing the game properly... so, what would I do if I had half a month's salary to spend on fun... Buy a high-end computer with video-editing capability. Too geeky? Okay... then I'd spend it on doing things that are fun... some mini-vacations... a weekend in New York City... three or four days in Washington... and, heading in the opposite direction, a weekend in Boston... train tickets and hotel rooms and meals should take care of that mythical paycheck. What would we do? Well, the big attraction in New York, of course, would be our grandson... otherwise, mostly go to art museums and such, walk around, eat at sidewalk cafes, relax with a cappuccino, enjoy the sights. Hey, do you know what a milliHellen is? It's the amount of beauty required to launch one ship. *grin* Enjoy what's left of the weekend and have a good week... |
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