Quiet night home tonight. It was my turn to go to trivia, but I'm fighting off a cold and pretty much out of spending money, so I gave up my spot.

Today I left my wallet at home, which I hardly ever do. I only needed it for my bus pass, but I was stumped for a second because I didn't have any cash. Then I remembered my envelope of $1 bills I took from my charity budget to give out on the street between Xmas and Thanksgiving. I never even gave away half of it; I'm not on the street much, and people are less apt to be out in our winter than in the nice weather! I gave $20 to a friend who was doing 31 nice things for her 31st birthday, but I still had some ones left over. I've given them out sporadically but honestly not that many people have asked me for money.

So I used $3 to get to work and $3 to get back. It's still a good use of charitable money; I'm very much in favor of Metro Transit, and it fits my values of sustainability and helping poor people survive.

***

I just redeemed $34.57 of Chase Freedom rewards. I decided to pull $35.43 from next month's extra debt repayment and send a $70 extra payment to NT's student loan, in hope of meeting or at least getting close to our January debt repayment goal. It'll hit the loan on the 24th or 25th, so we'll see how much goes to principal.

***

Remember my goal last year of getting and staying under 130 lbs.? Well, I managed to stay under 130 from about mid-November to last Sunday, when I ticked up to 132! I told myself if I went over, I'd go back to calorie counting until I got back down again. It's been an adjustment getting back into the calorie counting groove, but hopefully I'll get down under 130 again soon and can stop doing it again. I imagine it's something I'll have to do from time to time to stay on track, and I think that's OK. It's easy to slowly increase your calories without really realizing you're doing it.

***

We've been talking about what to do for our cat when we're in England for 2 weeks in May. Someone here mentioned that Jeffrey (SA site owner) does housesitting, so I actually contacted him! He'd do it but would need airfare, which ended up being prohibitive. But that got us on the idea of getting a housesitter who would pay their own transportation and would do it just for the free housing. We found a site where many of the users have background checks and references, and advertised last night. Really, when you think about it, a high-rise condo near downtown Minneapolis in the late spring is pretty attractive as a vacation spot. We've already got two responses, so we'll probably wait a bit longer, pick a couple of finalists and NT said we should try to Skype chat with them to get a feel for them. Turns out there are a lot of retired and/or telecommuting people who like to travel around and see new places by housesitting. Who knew?

***

We were talking about our big-picture goal of saving for a big move the other night. The $56K goal includes money for sprucing up our current condo to try and get a better price for it. NT asked if we could do some of the upgrades sooner than right before we try to sell, so we could enjoy them for a bit before we go. Someone else here (snafu maybe?) mentioned that a while back. We agreed it would be nice to update our super-dated bathroom with something a bit more modern once we get some of our big-picture money saved.

We've only got $5,000 budgeted for the bathroom (and we don't even have that saved up yet). So we'll have to be very careful about what we choose to do; I know renovations can quickly go over budget, and I really don't want to do that, because we'd either have to save more or cut back somewhere else.

But, it would be nice to have a bathroom we could really enjoy for a while. And I know NT would love all the planning and work (I'm no good at that side of things, but he loves home improvement and is always itching for a new project).

So we agreed we'll wait until we have at least $10K saved, and then we can talk about redoing the bathroom with $5K of it. We've only got $3K saved, so it'll be a while.

***

I'm still waiting on some tax docs, mostly for AS. I can probably send my and NT's off to our tax preparer soon. I'm just procrastinating mostly. I used to love doing taxes, but now they're so complicated, and I have them so we don't give the IRS an interest-free loan, so we don't have the anticipation of a big refund. I'm glad we have the money each month instead, but it does remove that big motivation to get the things done!

***

I've got 7 yesses and 1 maybe coming to my "League of Ordinary Savers" budgeting discussion group in February! I only invited 6 people, actually, but one said she's bringing her husband and another said a friend of hers saw the Facebook event and asked if she can join. I'm a teensy bit nervous now that there are a couple people I don't know coming, but at the same time excited!

I wrote one post and some "About" info on the companion blog. I haven't started a matching Facebook group yet; I'm going to wait until closer to the Feb. 10 meeting to start that.

I've been playing around with Mint.com so I can talk about more than just my one budgeting method. It wouldn't really work for me in real life, I don't think; for one thing I can't figure out how to link NT's UK accounts, so it doesn't really give a full picture. Also when I was last on it, my main checking account balance was showing as $0. I hope it was just taking a while to sync up; I have to go check again.

I also tried to set up a Payoff.com account, but I wasn't able to link my Barclays account properly. I think I was answering one of the security answers wrong, but if so I'm not sure what I would have said instead for that answer!

I'm mostly going to talk about the DIY methods such as Google Drive and physical envelopes. I like the hands-on approach vs. everything being automated; I feel like my Google system keeps me honest because if I don't keep tinkering with it, it will fall to pieces. So I know I have to stay involved with it, and that keeps me focused on our goals.

I've got some time to plan for the meeting, so if there are any important methods or tips you want to make sure I don't forget, let me know!