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Fitness progress, plus lots of blah blah blah

July 9th, 2012 at 06:46 pm

Got some fitness progress to catch up on:

10-min. exercise? No for July 5-6, yes for July 7-8. 5/8

Calorie counting? Yes for all four days:
July 5: estimated 1,313.
July 6: estimated 1,188.
July 7: estimated 2,516. (Date night!)
July 8: estimated 1,085.
8/8

Avoid night snacking? Yes for all four days. 8/8

My weight held pretty steady; I'm now at exactly 138, which is what I was rounding up to anyway. After the decadent desserts and drinks of date night, I feel lucky not to have slid backward!

***

The home declutter/reorg is gradually but steadily continuing.

- I got the CD/DVD jackets I ordered and put all of my and AS's discs in there, and threw away the cases. (Well, the DVD cases I put up on Freecycle, figuring someone who burns DVDs might want them. If I don't hear from anyone in the next day or two I'll throw them away.) I fit all the CDs and DVDs in one case except a few rows that I stored in the entertainment center drawers for now; when NT thins his collection and orders more shelves for the bigger storage unit, they should all fit there.

- I freecycled the now-empty storage unit and someone will be picking it up today or tomorrow. Once that's gone, it will leave a big blank wall that would be a great place for some original art. We know a couple artists and I'd love to support one of them, if they have something that would look good in our place.

- I put some of our board games under the sofa, and moved the remaining ones to the two lower shelves so that the one that's most visible is empty and clean. We'll try to keep it free of anything permanent and just store laptop, iPad and remotes there when not in use.

- NT ordered a higher bed frame for our king-size bed, which is now too low to the ground to store much under. Once that arrives, we'll be able to store some things under there (perhaps AS's larger bolts of fabric, for example).

- AS hemmed the balcony door curtains and sewed them together so they'd have a neater appearance. She'll do the matching window curtain soon.

All in all, the differences may be subtle, but it's feeling cleaner and more restful to us. I'll post before-and-after pics when we're at a better place.

***

One night last week, thinking about the need to save $80K to move to England, I started wondering how fast we could reach that goal if we deployed a "nuclear option"; pared our budget down to its bare bones and cut out all fun stuff, other savings and extra debt repayment.

The next day I got spreadsheet-happy and mocked up a drastically severe (for us) budget. All I kept were:
Mortgage
Groceries/household
Condo association dues
Daycare
Minimum student loan interest
Home insurance
Barber (but cut down frequency)
Diapers
Cell phones

I "cut":
Medical EF savings
Spending money
Cable and Internet
Netflix
Xmas & bdays
Housecleaning
CSA (farm share)
EF savings
Extra student loan repayment
Roth IRAs
Charitable giving
Travel
Car share

I was slightly shocked to see that we could raise over $4,000 per month (assuming no emergencies arose) and have the remaining $79K needed to reach $80K in a year and a half.

I showed it to AS and NT; they were suitably impressed. We're not going to implement this, at least not for the foreseeable future, but it's good to know that we have that ability. While this would be a difficult and not-fun exercise, it would be a good option if a chance to move to England did suddenly arise and we needed to turbo-charge our saving. At this point we're just going to see how much we can save while keeping our normal budget. If we do that for a year or so, maybe we can see how far we've gotten and re-consider the "nuclear option" then, which would be achievable in an even shorter window of time once we have some more of the $80K already saved up.

Speaking of the $1000 we already set aside for this house/moving fund, I decided to open a Barclays online savings account; it pays 1% interest and says it compounds daily. That's at least 10X the rate I get on my savings account that's linked to my checking account, so I think it's a good option. We decided we wanted zero risk on the house/moving fund, since the economy and markets are still so volatile.

***

And speaking of England, we semi-finalized our plans for a trip to bring the new little'un to meet her British grandparents. We decided to devote nearly a whole year's worth of vacation funds (and 9 days of PTO) so we can go for a full two weeks. At this point, plane tickets are so expensive that it would seem like a waste to go for less than that amount of time, but any more than that and we wouldn't have any vacation time to use around the winter holidays. We're going to go in late May or early June of next year, so we can take advantage of the Memorial Day holiday as part of it.

We figure airfare alone will be about $4K. Then we have to budget for travel insurance, rental car w/carseats, possibly a hotel for a few days (though we'll stay with people at least some of the time to economize), food/entertainment, and possibly boarding our kitty somewhere (or paying catsitters to come see him).

I reckon we can save $8500 between now and the trip, so after airfare (assuming we can get the price I'm counting on) that leaves $4500 for all of the above. If we're smart about planning, we'll be able to manage.

2 Responses to “Fitness progress, plus lots of blah blah blah”

  1. patientsaver Says:
    1341863897

    Congrats on the weight loss. I seem to be holding steady at 147 no matter what i try to do. I would like to get down to 130 or 135.

  2. ceejay74 Says:
    1341866071

    Thank you! I have tried a couple of different things that helped me lose weight. Of these, my current regime is kind of tedious (well, the calorie-counting part), but at least I get to eat whatever I want, as long as I try to moderate portions. If you've never done it, counting calories can be a real eye-opener. Sparkpeople and other sites have pretty big databases of food so that you can even make at least educated guesses on food that doesn't have a nutrition label (restaurant stuff, recipes, etc.)

    The other two effective weight-loss regimes were good for short periods but I wouldn't be able to keep them up indefinitely:

    1. Raw-foods fast. Eat only raw foods for two days, then switch to a sensible cooked meal at night, but still eat raw for breakfast and dinner.

    2. Cut out foods that tend to make me eat too many calories. For me I determined this to be any food containing any of these: all wheat products, white rice, white potatoes, all chips, beer, and all caloried sweeteners. I allowed three "cheat meals" per week. Cutting those ingredients helped me take off several pounds, but I didn't get enough variety for my taste, so it was a temporary solution.

    I recommend either of those or my current regimen to jumpstart weight loss.

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