Financial Diary, January 27, 2010

The money-related things I did today:

• picked up an admittedly somewhat gross penny. I always pick up pennies. Every one is a minuscule amount of time that I don't have to work.
  
• did several hours' worth of copy editing at $30 an hour. A type of work I actually like.
  
• prepared a Paperbackswap book to send
• read an article and watched a documentary on Dolly Freed, author of Possum Living. Was very excited to see that someone found the author of this strange-but-wonderful book on living very frugally. Was less excited to discover that her father was an alcoholic, and sounds emotionally abusive, too. He also spent several years vagrant and died alone. Which is ironic because...seriously, just read the article. And the book, if you're at all inclined towards extreme frugality or self-sufficiency.
  
• posted an announcement of that still-continuing ebay auction on a Livejournal community
• redeemed some Swagbucks (referral link) for a $5 Amazon gift card.
• sent a check to my SEP-IRA to push my balance above $2000 so I can invest the money (instead of keeping it in the money market account where it's been for the past two years) without incurring a "small balance" charge.
• got my annual "cash back" credit card rebate of $37.92
  
• didn't spend any money. The last time I spent something was last Thursday, $1.90 at the post office. Tomorrow, though, I'll break that streak by paying rent.

I was about to publish this and realized I forgot to include the biggest economic activity I engaged in today: worked 8.5 hours at my day job, and earned about $170 after tax and my 401(k) deduction, probably more like $350 to $400 if you were to count the cost of my benefits.

I spent 2.5 or 3 hours of that actually working, including an hourlong conference call and a meeting with my boss where she both semi-chewed me out for something I considered quite minor and asked me if I'd be willing to switch my day off (currently Wednesday) so that we can have regular staff meetings on Wednesdays. Staff meetings at my job are a special circle of hell, due to the complex and tension-laden relationships among my coworkers, and usually are blessedly infrequent. I suspect this sudden ramping up of the number of staff meetings is in preparation for a layoff that may happen in April. Hopefully it will just be the one person I think it will be and not someone who actually does their work. (Despite the fact that I only spent about 3 hours on work today, I *do* do my work . . . I'm just fast.)

Ain't employment grand? About six years left to go . . . even if I don't make my early retirement goal by then (and judging from last year's spending I won't), I think I'll let myself quit my current job on my 35th birthday and at least go freelance for a while.