Category: Entertainment

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How I Plan to Save Money This Year

This year I really need to work on saving some money.   I started using a new website to track all of my spending.  It shows me exactly where all of our money is going.  I was a little shocked to see how much money we really spend going out to eat or on fast food.  I’m setting a budget for everything.  I know we can’t cut everything off cold turkey so I’m going to have us do a step down method for our spending habits.

Right now we spend about $500 a month of groceries.  I would like to get that down closer to $300 or less but I know we need to work towards that.  To start I’m setting  a budget of $400 a month or roughly $100 a week on groceries.  I think we can manage to cut back by $25 a week to start with easily, especially if I really work to use up what we have in our pantry.  The following month I’ll move it to $75 a week.  If we do really well with that I might even be able to move it down a little further but I’m not going to go crazy.

We’re taking a closer look at television and cable services along with movie rentals.  We purchased a few pay per view movies on demand this month.  This is really silly considering we pay almost $20 a month for Netflix, we just need to send back our current DVD  to get the next one on our list.  My husband and I are thinking about turning off our cable television because just about everything we watch is available online and we do have Netflix.  We pay about $100 a month for cable so that’s more money we could save every month.

I know groceries and entertainment aren’t the only way we can save but at least it’s a start.  I was able to easily identify these ways to save and will do some digging into other ways to save that I might not be soo obvious to me.

 

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Commercial Volume is Too Loud

Watching live television is starting to drive me nuts.  I can’t stand how the volume of the commercials raises considerably during the commercial breaks.   I find it insulting!  I can’t fast forward through them on live television so I watch them or am forced to mute them.  Sometimes it’s soo loud it hurts my ears.  It’s especially annoying at night when the kids are sleeping and the volume blares through the roof on a commercial break.

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BIG Screen

We finally went out and got a fancy new big screen tv.  It’s an HDTV even has 3D.  I’ve never seen a tv with soo many ports on it to plug in various items.  I swear this thing could run our house it is soo darn high tech.  My husband is totally infatuated with the thing.  I bet there will be a permanent indent in the couch where he sits now.  I just hope he is willing to share with the rest of us.  He wanted to watch the big games and fights on it so we decided we could splurge a little since I made a little extra money with some of the junk I sold.  I feel like we finally belong in the 21st century now.

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Happy Endings

Have you ever noticed that all the children’s movies have happy endings? They seem to have a formula of introducing the main characters, then bringing in a bad guy, the heroes setting out to save the day, and the good guy gets the girl.

I don’t know if this is because people think children need to be protected from realities or if they are just an easy formula to write into a script. So many of the really old children’s shows were straight forward about who was bad and why. The hero always swooped in and with a few struggles, overcomes the bad guys. The people who suffer deserve it. True love always wins.

I wish real life was that easy.

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Kid Songs on VHS

We went to a yard sale last weekend and came across a bunch of rally nice kids toys and some old VHS tapes with kids shows and kids songs on them.

The toys were old wooden puzzles and a few My Little Pony dolls for only 50 cents each. The puzzles cost almost ten dollars brand new, so I grabbed up 6 of them like they were gold.

They only wanted 25 cents for each tape! I couldn’t believe it! I know everyone is using DVDs now, but the kids can play with an old VCR that we keep in the living room and I don’t have to worry about them scratching the expensive DVDs.

All together, it was a great day for bargains and we have some new things to do on the next rainy day.

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Summer Movies

There are so many movies out this summer that are made for kids. If I had little boys, I could take them to a different movie at the theater every week and they would have a great time!

But, I have a little girl and she is not old enough to appreciate most of the movies yet. We’ll have to wait a few more years. In the meantime, I know the good ones will come out on DVD and I can add them to her library of movies on special occasions.

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Harry Potter

So I still haven’t gone to see the new Harry Potter movie.  I read all of the books and have seen all of the other films.  I was a little disappointed with the last one actually.  I hated that they cute the last book in half and made two movies out of it.  I’ve heard great reviews about this new movie and am excited to see it.  I’m thinking we might go next week once the crazy buzz dies down a bit.  I don’t feel like dealing with hundreds of Potter fans all dressed up and shouting at the screen while I try to enjoy the show in peace.  I guess I’m just not in the mood right now.

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Snowbirds and Retirees

So many people work all theirs lives with dreams of retiring someplace like Florida or Arizona. For many, they spend half of each year in their cold northern home states and the other half in a sunny warmer state. Those people are called “Snowbirds” because they come to Miami or Orlando or Phoenix to escape the cold weather and spend their winters someplace warm.

My grandparents have dreamed of retiring and moving to Arizona and are trying to make that happen now. They picked Sun City and have found a home. Just to be safe, they are have an alarm system installed in their new house before they move in. They wanted to stay with ADT, who they used back in Michigan. So they searched home security suncity to find someone locally.

Next, they want to get Direct TV hooked up so my Grampa can watch all of his sports shows.He says the best part of retirement will be watching all the games he used to miss when he had to work second shift at the plant. I think that is great – he deserves to watch whatever he wants to after all these years of working hard and missing out on his favorite games.

He loves the Lions and all the Detroit teams, bless his heart! At least his beloved Red Wings have been playing well these past years, but its 3 or 4 months to go before hockey starts back up. And Gramps will be watching!

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Summer Reruns

Television has always been a part of my life. I watched cartoons on Saturday mornings as a kid, I was allowed to watch some comedy shows at night after my homework was completed, and then I watched movies and some drama shows as I got older. I realize that TV is a relatively new medium. I read somewhere that is was created in the 1940’s but that most American households could not watch anything because there were no networks and no shows being broadcast because of the War. In the 1950’s, a lot of Americans bought their first TV sets and some shows, especially the evening news began broadcasting.

What a long way we’ve come from the 1950’s to today, with cable and satellite and movies being downloaded over the internet to be watched on laptops, tablets and even phones! And yet, we still have very short seasons of new shows to watch and then a long drought of reruns and nothing interesting to watch all summer. When does the programming department catch up with modern life and change the length of the season to something the viewers want?

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TV Trivia

My generation has always had TV and cable, but my parents did not. I found some interesting trivia on a web site about TV. For example, did you know that although the television set was built and sold as early as 1939, that there were almost no television broadcasting stations because of World War II? Most Americans did not have access to local programming until the 1950’s, so the affluent and middle class did not start buying them for home use until the 1950’s and 1960’s.

Another interesting fact is that in the year 2006, the number of television sets in American homes outnumbered the number of human occupants for the first time. The average American home had  2.73 TV sets but only 2.55 people, and that number of TV sets per home continues to increase.