Glen Brammell Journal

Today is Saturday and I have a problem. I have been promising to clean up the garage and it looks like the day has finally come. I can put it off no longer. I am not looking forward to this as I know there will be some debate with my wife over what items to keep and which ones to throw away. She doesn’t seem to understand the importance of keeping items that we may need in the future.

Anyway, I guess I’ll get started and do what I can to get the garage clean while limiting the damage done to our inventory. Maybe I can distract her later with a shopping trip!!

The power of the internet is pretty awesome. With just a few clicks and keywords, you can find information on just about anything. Even if the information you need is in another country. This happened to me recently. I was talking with my aunt who still lives in the UK. She has been planning to move and wanted me to help her find a low-cost removal company to move her things.

She has lived in the same apartment for many years. She has always dreamed of living near the water and now she has her chance. She will be moving at the end of the month. The problem is that with all the expenses of her new home, she has to keep her house removal costs to a minimum. I thought I could help and so I did some research online.

I found out that moving can be costly. The good news was that there are many companies out there who can do the job for less. It’s important to have as many moving quotes as possible in order to make a good decision. The site I found above does just that. My aunt is happy to know that she can move to her new home without a lot of worry. Thank goodness for the internet!

Some days I want a candy or something sweet, and other days I want something salty or crunchy. I wonder what makes us crave one thing over the the other? The time of day for me to crave candy seems to be after dinner. Did the invention of dessert have anything to do with appeasing a sweet tooth after a big meal?

I know that I used to love chocolate as a kid, and the Halloween and Easter holidays were two of my favorites because they are both big days for candies. I couldn’t wait to go trick or treating and bring home a huge bag of candy to sort through and eat as much as I could before my mom got alarmed and cut me off.

Nowadays I try to hold out for good candy, not just grocery store checkout impulse purchases. I like a quality chocolate and try to measure the good ones against the taste of the famous Sees candies that I used to have as a kid. If its not as good as Sees candies, then I don’t want it.

When my grandparents retired and moved to Arizona, they started mailing a box of Sees candies to my mom and dad for holidays and gift occasions, like birthdays and anniversaries. Since they lived out West, they could buy Sees candies anywhere, but back East we couldn’t buy them anywhere. Of course, now we can order Sees candies online have them delivered. But getting them as a gift from my grandparents was always a big part of the special occasion. Any time I see a box of Sees, it makes me think of my grandparents and their little adobe house out in Arizona.

The neighbor came by this morning to warn me about this weekend. They are having a kids birthday party and the place will be noisy and busy with a couple dozen kids running and screaming across the yards. I remember how it as last year, and can’t believe its already been year since that birthday party.

There is just something about 20 eight and nine year olds running around that gives me a headache just thinking about it. That is way too much energy and noise for me. But for a lot of people, throwing kids birthday parties is like a competitive sport. They hire Party and Event Rentals companies to handle all the details for their kid and the friends, and then the parents don’t have to do much but run the video recorder and chit chat with the other parents who come to the party.

The smart ones hire out the Food Catering, the entertainment and the clean up. The parties in my neighborhood have come a long way since the days when I was a kid and thought that a couple hours in the mall arcade with unlimited tokens was the ultimate party. Nowadays they have
Bounce House Rentals, clowns, face painters, carnival games and all kinds of entertainment options. Its good to be a kid.

My niece and her husband are tightening their belts since she is pregnant again and isn’t going to be able to work for awhile. So thinks that they will be OK with bills if hey cut back on a few things and if she takes advantage of coupons and free samples by searching online for deals.

We talked about the real math of what she was earning after expenses and she was really shocked to see how little real money she was bringing home in her paycheck. She took 30% off the top for taxes, then had to take off child care, her car payment/car insurance/gas, oil, tires and then a lot more things she hadn’t thought of. Like the true cost of lunch away from home, the cost of convenience foods for dinners when she was too tired or too rushed to cook, the cost of nice clothes, dry cleaning and pantyhose. The actual net cash she was seeing was less than $50 a week.

We all believe that she could save that same net amount by looking for Free Stuff online and using coupons, and being more budget conscious if she stayed home with the kids instead of working outside of the home.  Finding Freebies is even fun – it is like a treasure hunt. She gets online in the living room while her daughter plays and finds ways to save money. I wish it were that easy for the rest of us!