I feel like it's been a while since I just blogged randomly about stuff. I've actually got a free moment at work (we'll see how long it lasts) so here goes!

February is turning out to be hugely social! Looks like we'll routinely have two or three weeknight things going on plus events on the weekend. This week there's actually something happening every weeknight! Tonight NT is going to a basketball game our friend got an extra ticket for, while AS and I will head out to the DFL caucus with AA in tow. Usually Tuesdays are our one night out to trivia at a local bar, so even if we didn't have this going on we'd have been busy today. Tomorrow is the Birth Center hospital tour, Thursday is a happy hour for AS's work, and Friday I have some fellow college alumni coming to our house for dinner.

When February is over, we have four birthdays (everyone in my household is a March birthday) and then a due date of April 3 for the new little one!

This has also been a very sad month for several friends/acquaintances of mine. One woman lost her father; another dealing with her mother's declining health and dementia; another woman had to have a double mastectomy and will undergo chemo for breast cancer; and a friend of a friend whom I quite like even though I don't see her much lost her boyfriend to suicide! Such a helpless feeling that I can't do anything for them really, but I'm sending flowers to the last two. None of these are people I'm currently close to or see on a regular basis, but all people I'm fond of.

It's reawakened my appreciation of my healthy-so-far family and reminded me to appreciate every moment of my relationships. I definitely have noticed more words of affection being passed around in my household, so I think we've all been similarly affected.

Otherwise on the home front, I've been feeling the positive results of the "Getting Things Done" book; papers don't just hang around on surfaces anymore, at least not for more than a day. We're all on Google Calendar now and I'll soon show NT how to use Google Tasks and Google Docs for the GTD system. My goal is to eventually get even our menu and grocery list electronic, and eliminate those last two pieces of stray paper!

I started reading Elizabeth and Amelia Warren's book All Your Worth (thank you Paulette/Spondulicks for the recommendation!) and loving it. I don't think there will be much that I change about my current system, but only because it adheres pretty closely to her system. I'm only about halfway through, though, so maybe I'll get some new ideas. I do know that so far, I'd recommend it to anyone who wants a simple system for getting their life under control. It's very accessible and friendly in tone.

It even articulated a thought I had recently, a little light-bulb moment. I was thinking about how it could be that so many people today can be so stupid and irresponsible about their money compared with how it seems older generations coped without getting into so much debt.

Then it occurred to me that probably the older generations weren't any smarter or more practical by nature, but just didn't have as many easy-credit traps available to them, so they simply couldn't get into as much debt.

The Warrens confirmed that, but in a much more factual and less hunch-y way. It was all this deregulation that happened I think they said in the 1970s that allowed banks and other lenders to loan money more freely; for a long time they had much stricter standards they had to follow about whether they thought the borrower would be able to pay it back.

Not only did they not need to rise to these standards anymore, but they also quickly discovered that they made much more profit if they DID loan to people who couldn't always pay in full on time; that way they got to charge all sorts of fees and penalties and made much more than they would have just charging interest.

They also pointed out that many more people used to be able to count on a pension in addition to other retirement funds. I think there were a few other things that had changed but I can't recall at the moment.

What they were saying is that we need to be a lot smarter now; instead of financial institutions being forced to look out for people to a certain extent, there's now extreme incentive for those same companies to outsmart, mislead and confuse people instead.

That said, I got a surprise bonus from a big financial company last night: Chase refunded my $69 fee from one of our Southwest cards, which we applied for only to get a big bonus in Amazon gift cards. I didn't ask for the fee back, so I'm surprised! It reminded me to cancel the other two cards since we've recently received our gift cards from those; hopefully they'll refund those fees as well!

I'm putting the $69 into an extra student loan payment this month; should be able to send nearly $2000 extra now! I'm enjoying putting together as big a payment as possible this month because between tax preparation, baby preparation and unpaid parental leave, I won't be paying quite as much extra off for a few months.