It hasn't cleared the bank yet, but we authorized payment to the credit card for the remaining balance, which means we are almost half way through our debt and only have the SUV and my student loans left to pay off. Oh my gosh! I drew a black line through the credit card on our poster-sized budget on the kitchen wall. It's amazing to know that we will be able to nearly double the SUV payment for the next few months and then it will be paid off - about a year and a half early!
It's already nice knowing that the Honda is paid off, but when the Expedition gets paid off, it will be amazing. I can't even begin to describe how it feels to know that we won't have any car payments. Yeah, we have 10 year old vehicles, but they're ours. I can't fathom paying $300 or more a month just to have a new car. It's never been important to me to have the newest, coolest car. Plus, being my practical self, I just can't see paying for a new car that depreciates almost by half the minute I drive it off the lot. What a horrible waste of money that is. And, as evidenced by our journey to financial freedom, we don't waste money any more!
Ah, to be debt free..... We're nearly half way there in just 18 months. In another 18 months, I'll be posting, "We're Debt Free!"
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Downsizing
Downsizing for most people probably involves getting a smaller space, cutting out the clutter, that kind of thing. For us, it means purging the bookshelves. For those who don't know, when we moved into our house, we built a massive wall of shelves. Seriously massive. This is no sissy bookshelf. It's 9 feet high and 14 feet across. The lower 3 feet is cabinets to house CDs, DVDs, and even some VHS tapes that we just haven't gotten around to replacing yet... Which leaves, of course, 6 feet of open shelving for books. And we've filled it - nearly every inch of it with books from Dr. Seuss to the Qu'ran and everything in between. And it still wasn't enough, especially considering that we are constantly reading and acquiring new books. Today, we downsized a little bit, and our books can breathe a little easier. There's actually space on some of those shelves!
In addition to the books we wanted to keep, we had approximately 8 boxes of books in the garage that we knew we didn't want to keep. We have a hard time throwing out books (could you tell?), so we didn't want to just dump them. And yet we also would like to see some kind of return on our investment, so we were hoping that at some point, maybe someone would buy them all at a garage sale. No luck there. I found a site called Cash4Books (http://www.cash4books.net/) and thought it looked promising. Nothing like getting some cash for all those books, right? That would be true if they bought all the books. They don't. But I'll get to that later.
I also found another site called PaperBackBookSwap (handy link is on the right side of my page - sign up, it's free, I get credit, yadda yadda). This is cool - post your books and send them to people who request them. In return, earn credit for each book you send that can used to request a book from someone else. You pay postage to mail the books, and you receive your requests free. So $3 for a book instead of $10-whatever. It's cool. I got 2 of my book club selections and am waiting on several more to arrive. I sent out 6 books today, and have about 13 more in the queue. The cost to send them adds up, but I will have that many "free" books coming my way in the future.
So, after finding these sites, I realized that we could try to sell some and whatever we couldn't sell at Cash4Books, I would post on PaperBackBookSwap. And today that's what we did. We set up an assembly line, if you will. Howard ran the ISBN numbers through Cash4Books, setting aside those that could be sold through them. Everything else came through me to post on the Swap. Of the nearly 200 books we went through, we are able to send 11 to Cash4Books for a total of about $42 (and they pay shipping). The rest have been posted on the Swap. I already ran out of Tyvek envelopes!
At the end of the day, we've done a good thing. We downsized the bookshelves, decluttered part of the garage, made a little cash (well, as soon as we send the books), and will make many people happy with books for their own collections. It was sad, too. We threw away about 2 boxes of books - some of the books had no ISBN numbers and were just in bad shape, and another box had been peed on by a cat (damn those neighborhood cats sneaking into my garage!)... And I now have 4 four-foot stacks of books in my kitchen, so perhaps I'm not as decluttered and downsized as I thought?
In addition to the books we wanted to keep, we had approximately 8 boxes of books in the garage that we knew we didn't want to keep. We have a hard time throwing out books (could you tell?), so we didn't want to just dump them. And yet we also would like to see some kind of return on our investment, so we were hoping that at some point, maybe someone would buy them all at a garage sale. No luck there. I found a site called Cash4Books (http://www.cash4books.net/) and thought it looked promising. Nothing like getting some cash for all those books, right? That would be true if they bought all the books. They don't. But I'll get to that later.
I also found another site called PaperBackBookSwap (handy link is on the right side of my page - sign up, it's free, I get credit, yadda yadda). This is cool - post your books and send them to people who request them. In return, earn credit for each book you send that can used to request a book from someone else. You pay postage to mail the books, and you receive your requests free. So $3 for a book instead of $10-whatever. It's cool. I got 2 of my book club selections and am waiting on several more to arrive. I sent out 6 books today, and have about 13 more in the queue. The cost to send them adds up, but I will have that many "free" books coming my way in the future.
So, after finding these sites, I realized that we could try to sell some and whatever we couldn't sell at Cash4Books, I would post on PaperBackBookSwap. And today that's what we did. We set up an assembly line, if you will. Howard ran the ISBN numbers through Cash4Books, setting aside those that could be sold through them. Everything else came through me to post on the Swap. Of the nearly 200 books we went through, we are able to send 11 to Cash4Books for a total of about $42 (and they pay shipping). The rest have been posted on the Swap. I already ran out of Tyvek envelopes!
At the end of the day, we've done a good thing. We downsized the bookshelves, decluttered part of the garage, made a little cash (well, as soon as we send the books), and will make many people happy with books for their own collections. It was sad, too. We threw away about 2 boxes of books - some of the books had no ISBN numbers and were just in bad shape, and another box had been peed on by a cat (damn those neighborhood cats sneaking into my garage!)... And I now have 4 four-foot stacks of books in my kitchen, so perhaps I'm not as decluttered and downsized as I thought?
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