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I will be writing about this pretty soon once I come to terms with what really happened in Mumbai on the 26th. My friend Atul has been blogging about the incident the past few days. Check it out here

This evening, I bid adieu to my Nintendo Wii. It happened to be another one of my category B items. I was never a big video-gamer and this happened to be one of those impulsive ‘you-gotta-have-it-since-most-your-friends-have-it-too’ buys. Also, Wii demands a lot of physical activity and the lazy bum that I’m, this was an absolute no-brainer to me :D. Then I also got my PS3 a few days later, which pretty much made the Wii redundant. I put it on Craigslist and within an hour, it was gone. There are quite a few more things that I’d love to get rid of. I shall keep posting about them regularly

Money made - $240. Time to get the money-meter rolling

www.365daysoftrash.com

I was watching CNN yesterday and saw this dude on TV. I was not able to catch the whole interview but did take note of the site he was talking about. www.365daysoftrash.com . I made a note to myself that I was going to take a look at this site first thing in the morning. What I saw has impressed me to no end. This guy is a crusader for all of us earth-friendly souls and what he’s doing must serve as a great motivation to all of us towards going green. In fact, many a things that he talks about are quite close to what I’ve written in my green project writeup. Check the site out and see for yourself how you can equip yourself to go green for the coming year! www.365daysoftrash.com . It’s absolutely amazing!

We have been using this detergent for over two months now and Khushi just swears by it. Not only is it way cheaper than its competitive brands, it is eco-friendly too. Works as good as any other chlorine-laced detergent except that it doesn’t have any chlorine in it. Check it out, you will like it too. We got it at a nearby Costco.

Here’s more info from the manufacturer.

I and Khushi are major movie buffs. We see at least 3-4 movies every week and NetFlix has been one of our greatest movie resource over the past 2 years or so. Recently we got a great deal on AT&T UVerse’s 200 channel program and honestly, we haven’t been able to keep up with all the movies out there. To make things worse (or better?), ATT gave us a free upgrade to their U300 program. That meant even more movies. The movies that we used to get from Netflix just started laying around for days together, if not months! I was enrolled on their 2-at-a-time program for 13.99 a month. Usually, that meant 2 movies over the weekend during our cable-free life which was too good a deal. But now, with all the choice available, it didn’t make much sense. So today I downgraded to their 1-at-a-time program for 8.99 which I’m not sure is gonna get used that much either. Still this means a 5 dollar saving every month which translates to $60 a year.

Money scraped this month = $5.

In my Green Project Writeup recently, I had written about some of the measures we have been taking to go green. Changing all our high-wattage bulbs with CFLs was one of them. Here is a comparison of the last few electric bills and the effect that CFLs have had on our energy costs. Feels great to go green and save some green at the same time!

11/07/2008 - $67.36

10/08/2008 - $79.21

09/08/2008 - $85.35

08/07/2008 - $99.51

My money scraping project continues in it’s 4th day. I got a little busy with work yesterday so could not blog. But here is yesterday’s update for you.

That’s right. What you see is a bag full of coins! Yours truly, as you already know, isn’t that great when it comes to managing money. That’s why I seldom carry currency with me. Even if I do, I tend to exchange bills. That way, I dont have to do the math you see! But what do I get in return? Loads of coins. And I dont know what to do with them than to just throw them on the dining table as soon as I come home. Khushbu, on the other side, has been really meticulous in collecting all those coins and keeping them in a safe place. And what you see must be the accumulated product of maybe 6 months of spare change. You must be curious to know how much change was in that bag right? Well, here is the receipt for you that I got from a Coinstar machine.

Yes, that was $51 worth of change. That would be a whopping $100+ in change for the year!

Here is a tip if you plan to use a Coinstar machine. Chose one of the gift certificate options rather than cash. That way, you end up saving on the commission that Coinstar charges on cash exchange. We got an Amazon gift certificate which can be used to buy pretty much anything.

You might already know this by now but if you don’t then this is HUGE! Chandrayaan-I successfully landed on the lunar surface yesterday and planted our Indian national flag on moon! This makes India the first country in the world to successfully carry out a lunar space expedition on the first attempt. This is one of the proudest moments in my life as an Indian citizen. Bravo ISRO and bravo India.

Link

View the Chandrayaan page on this site here

It’s Friday and I finally got my paycheck today. Yay! However, I had to hit the ground running. This afternoon, I started making all my credit card payments first. Utilities are the next in line. I got hit by a massive ATT UVerse bill for $320 yesterday. Since when did cable become so expensive, I have no idea. That is for 2 months though, but still it’s pretty darn high. From what is left after this, I will have to somehow squeeze in my monthly house payment. I don’t think I will be able to make the entire $3500 but let’s see if I can squeeze some moolah in from other corners.

My money scraping saga continued today too. I just opened up one of my old credit card accounts and I realized that there were some points that I had accumulated over the years which were just lying around for a couple of years now! I called up Citi and asked them if I could use them somehow. Guess what? Not only did they convert those points over to Thank You points, they said I could group them together with my other Thank you points! That bumped up my overall Thank You points to over 11000 which would be worth $110. Sweet!

I shall be updating my Debt Meter sometime tomorrow once all the payments are taken care of. Payments I have made so far today -
CC1 - $182.74
CC2 - $25

Money made today $110.