Today

Definitely have my mind focused on money this week!

DH has been having a rough week at work it is end of quarter/end of fiscal year. He is under a lot of pressure to bring a lot of deals in by the end of the month, and a lot of them are just falling apart. He is very stressed. It's not good to have a really bad Q4, and if it really turns out that bad I'm not sure if his actual job would be in jeopardy. He says stuff like "if I still have a job". I'm pretty sure he's just blowing off steam, but it does stress me out . . .

I have been looking far and wide for Craft Fairs to sign up for, and then yesterday I saw a sign for a Craft Show in my own town this weekend! I called and was able to get a booth for Saturday. So, I will spend the next 2 days prepping for that.

I called on the Checking Account with the 4.44% interest rate, and I think I'm going to do it once we have saved $25,000. We are at $17,000 right now and should hopefully be up to the $25,000 when (if) my husband gets his big end of the fiscal year commission check (of course, now that Q4 is not looking so good, the commission could be much smaller than expected) - but we'll see.

I asked every question I could think of about the checking account and it seems do-able. Basically I'll need to make 15 debit card transactions each month (atm withdrawals don't count), and make one direct deposit each month (any electronic deposit of money counts). So, I think I can handle that - though it does messy up our accounts a little bit.

Here's how I think I will do it:

- 1st of the month - instead of withdrawing our "cash" for the envelopes at the beginning of each month, I will instead electronically transfer (deposit) funds from our regular checking account to this new account.

- I will then use the new debit card (instead of cash) to pay for what used to be our cash categories: Groceries, Gifts, Clothing, Dining Out, Auto Gas. (I think we'll still use cash for "Blow".) I will try to do as many transactions at the beginning of the month to be sure to fulfill the 15 transactions requirement. I plan to stop for gas a bunch of times and just add $5 each time and then to do a few transactions at the grocery store each time.

The 15 transactions part is a bit of a pain, but if we put in $25,000 of our FFEF, 4.44% interest on that will be over $90 a month! That's worth a bit of inconvenience to me. I'm looking at it like another part time job. I make $32/hour at the church nursery, so this should take less than 3 hours and earn me the same.