An article on Sound Money Tips reads:

LowCards.com is a great online resource to compare your current rate and rewards with other cards. It’s also a good resource for comparing offers you receive in the mail. It ranks and reviews credit cards and explains the fees and terms found in the fine print.

They have also posted a useful Guide to Credit Cards. Though I personally don’t intend to, nor have I ever been that involved with my credit cards. I rarely use them, and never have big balances. I like to keep my credit cards manageable, and resist the temptation for large purchases unless I already have the money in my checking account.

I’ve been overly productive in 2007 so far. It’s a good feeling, and a high I intend to ride for as long as I can till the busy season hits me in April.

I received my tax return. With this money I have eliminated all of my debt except for my car payment. I owe no money to a single solitary soul. And that is always a refreshing feeling. Once my car is paid off, I will be paying myself car payments instead, into my savings account with ING at a 4.5% interest rate.

I have also given my father a used car to drive. It was given to us for free, but cost $202 to inspect and $202 for tags and title. Now he has a vehicle that is better on gas mileage, is an automatic to help save his poor legs, and is not older than sin.

I have also set up automatic transfers from my checking account into my ING savings account at $100/month. I was originally going to do this manually, and have realized since I opened the account in August, that I have not done justice to my savings account. I read in one of the many financial advice journals that you should -always- pay yourself first. Automatic transfers are great because they force you to pay yourself, rather than allowing you to procrastinate. They also force you to be more conscious about the things you do spend money on each month, to make sure you have enough to make ends meet.

Once my overdraft savings with BB&T is back at $500, I will be putting $200/month into my ING account instead of $100.

I have also opened up a second savings account with ING (at the 4.5% interest rate) with an initial deposit of $120, and will be putting $60/month into it to act as my holiday fund. Come November I will have well over $600 to do as I please with. Granted I am not one to partake in holiday frivolities, but I do intend to spoil my father, my sweetheart, and make sure my sister is given something a bit more wholesome than video games and useless gadgets. Any excess will be transferred into my other savings account to gain interest.

I have also pledged to my Grove $30 a month in donations to go towards the cost of the building. The Witan thought that during the Yule ritual this year, we would (as the board of directors) display our passion for the Grove with our public pledges, in hopes that it would encourage the membership to give as well (this area is lacking). I am not sure of the outcome as of yet, but it’s still early.

I went through all of my DVD-R’s/RW’s, and CD-R’s/RW’s after purchasing a 250gig external harddrive, and copied all of my pertinent information from them as well as my computer onto the external HD as a backup. I no longer have to purchase disks to backup anything, which saves me money as well as space and headache trying to organize and find disks and salvage ones that get scratched up.

I’m currently going through all our old photo albums and scanning them into digital format as backups and for my online gallery. Then I will be placing them back into the books in a more organized fashion so they aren’t always falling out and being all messy.

I am also going through old magazines (more specifically “wellness” magazines) and copying any interesting articles into another Wordpress journal for digital archiving. One of my biggest flaws is saving old magazines that I never read again. They really tend to clutter up everywhere, so I’d like a better way to save information I want, and not have to deal with the paper piles everywhere. Also this way I can share this information with people once I link up the site.

I have created an online book database of every book I own. My database consisted of exactly 250 books, but I have started putting my fathers in as well which has so far brought it up to 275 and growing. This way I have a digital record of all of my books should something happen to them. I keep a copy uploaded to my domain as well as backed up on my external HD. (If anyone wants a copy of the Readerware software to keep track of their own library, let me know).

I have started cleaning up the code on old projects with the endless amount of knowledge I’ve been learning at work about CSS and site optimization. I’ve started other web projects to help organize my own personal information, such as my MudBlog for archiving my vehicle information, my dedicants journal, and my picture gallery of all of my photos.

Some future plans include, planning my 2007 garden, investing in a Roth IRA this spring after some more research, researching landlord information for the state of Maryland for when I decide to buy that house to rent out as a duplex, create my musical portfolio, etc.

I have many other things on my list to do still, but I can at least say that I’ve started this purge of clutter and invocation of order and understanding in my life.

Other things I’ve posted about recently concerning reshaping my finances:
Researched monthly bill costs such as my long distance and cellphone services and went with cheaper more efficient plans
Called up all my credit card companies and asked to have my APR lowered

Almost a month ago I posted a link to 22 ways to overclock your brain.

Today I stumbled across an article written by About.com about 10 ways to improve mental fitness.

1) Play Games
Games are a wonderful way to tease and challenge your brain. Suduko, crosswords and electronic games can all improve your brain’s speed and memory. These games rely on logic, word skills, math and more. These games are also fun. You’ll get benefit more by doing these games a little bit every day — spend 15 minutes or so, not hours.

2) Meditation
Daily meditation is perhaps the single greatest thing you can do for your mind/body health. Meditation not only relaxes you, it gives your brain a workout. By creating a different mental state, you engage your brain in new and interesting ways.

3) Eat for Your Brain
Your brain needs you to eat healthy fats. Focus on fish oils from wild salmon, nuts such as walnuts, seeds such as flax seed and olive oil. Eat more of these foods and less saturated fats. Eliminate transfats completely from your diet.

4) Tell Good Stories
Stories are a way that we solidify memories, interpret events and share moments. Practice telling your stories, both new and old, so that they are interesting, compelling and fun. Some basic storytelling techniques will go a long way in keeping people’s interest both in you and in what you have to say.

5) Turn Off Your Television
The average person watches more than 4 hours of television everyday. Television can stand in the way of relationships, life and more. Turn off your TV and spend more time living and exercising your mind and body.

6) Exercise Your Body To Exercise Your Brain
Physical exercise is great brain exercise too. By moving your body, your brain has to learn new muscle skills, estimate distance and practice balance. Choose a variety of exercises to challenge your brain.

7) Read Something Different
Books are portable, free from libraries and filled with infinite interesting characters, information and facts. Branch out from familiar reading topics. If you usually read history books, try a contemporary novel. Read foreign authors, the classics and random books. Not only will your brain get a workout by imagining different time periods, cultures and peoples, you will also have interesting stories to tell about your reading, what it makes you think of and the connections you draw between modern life and the words.

Learn a New Skill
Learning a new skill works multiple areas of the brain. Your memory comes into play, you learn new movements and you associate things differently. Reading Shakespeare, learning to cook and building an airplane out of toothpicks all will challenge your brain and give you something to think about.

9) Make Simple Changes
We love our routines. We have hobbies and pastimes that we could do for hours on end. But the more something is ’second nature,’ the less our brains have to work to do it. To really help your brain stay young, challenge it. Change routes to the grocery store, use your opposite hand to open doors and eat dessert first. All this will force your brain to wake up from habits and pay attention again.

10) Train Your Brain
Brain training is becoming a trend. There are formal courses, websites and books with programs on how to train your brain to work better and faster. There is some research behind these programs, but the basic principles are memory, visualization and reasoning. Work on these three concepts everyday and your brain will be ready for anything.

6:29pm - My dad answers the phone, not realizing who is calling and when someone asks for me, he says I’m right here. Little did he know, it was my mother.

She invited me and my father out to dinner tomorrow. Obviously I said no (I actually said I had plans), so she said she would see if we can go out next weekend.

6:35pm - Someone calls while I’m on the phone with my sweetheart, I don’t switch over because I don’t hang up for anyone when I’m talking with my sweetheart.

6:41pm - Mom calls again (I checked the caller I.D. this time) only it was my sister calling to leave a message that my mom wants to go buy groceries and come over to cook dinner for me and my father sometime.

6:46pm - Sister calls again from her fathers cellphone (they are all three going out to dinner tonight at Sakura apparently). Didn’t leave a message this time though.

I don’t know -what- to think. But she has -got- to be up to something. We haven’t spoken since the legendary myspace incident.

There’s something fishy going on. She’s gotta be up to something.

Here’s an interesting tradition in relation to the “love” holiday.

Beginning in the 1980s, in the centre of the southern Hungarian city of Pécs, lovers began to clamp padlocks to a wrought-iron fence in a narrow street linking the mosque in the city’s main square and the magnificent medieval cathedral, as a symbol of their commitment to one another. However, after the fence was completely covered and no more padlocks could be added, couples, both locals and tourists, began attaching them to fences and statues throughout the town centre.

Kinda grotesque, but this video speaks volumes.

My dad and I are the only poor people on our road. Everyone else is rich, heck some of their houses on our street are just their “vacation” homes, they actually live elsewhere. It’s not a million dollar development or anything, it’s just a really nice place with nice homes (except ours). My nextdoor neighbor alone inherited like 300,000 from dead relatives, and their son (a few years older than me and still lives at home) makes about $50k a year and inherits everything of his grandfathers (farm, old studebakers etc) when he dies.

My dad makes some change mowing their lawns in the summer and plowing their driveways in the winter. He doesn’t make much doing it, but it’s enough to pay for gas and breakfast at the old country restaurant now and then.

Well, this morning it snowed ice. Thick sticky bullshit that is impossible to walk on let alone plow. My dad has spent the majority of the day this morning 1. Shoveling our driveway because he thought I would have to go to work today, luckily I didn’t. 2. 2 or 3 hours getting the tractor running because it’s a 1947 model “A” John Deere and the goddamn thing is old. 3. Trying to plow this thick sticky mush of ice which doing two driveways has taken another 2 or 3 hours alone.

During this time, I’m inside trying to do some work from home, and the phone is ringing off the hook with neighbors that are “expecting” him to come out and plow their driveway like he normally does. One lady really pissed me off it was hard not to answer the phone and tell her to get off her ass and shovel her own damn driveway, because she called back to back (literally) about 10 times (my dad was outside) because she wanted it plowed. Eventually she walked up to our house to find out where my dad was. (She can walk up the road to our house but not plow her own driveway).

It’s not like they pay him a lot of money to do this. I just had to give him my card to get more gas for the tractor because he ran out. And these rich people are just taking advantage of his good nature.

As a matter of fact, the time it took me to type this one neighbor stopped by again (his second time again) and the phone is ringing from another neighbor that is calling probably her 3rd or 4th time.

These people are driving me up a fucking wall. What they should do is put their money together and buy my dad a brand new tractor if they’re so damn helpless.

My dad went out for groceries this morning, only because we didn’t have any, not because of the snow. The roads were really bad on the way back (even in 4-wheel drive), he said, so I’m staying home from work, and hopefully gonna VPN in so I can work from home.

He said that the grocery store was empty as far as content goes though. The manager said they were mobbed with people yesterday coming in to buy everything.

We were discussing it, and we really don’t understand people like this. Do people not have enough toilet paper and milk to survive 1 day? Because that’s the most it takes before the roads are cleared by the salt trucks.

Why do people panic so much when it snows? I’m all about being prepared, but going out and buying so many supplies when you’re only going to be stuck in your house for a few hours is a bit ridiculous. I suppose this is the type of thing that can be expected if there’s ever some sort of natural disaster or biological warfare. I’m confident and my father’s and my abilities to survive without going into panic mode.

Eventually I would like to establish a nice set of preparedness inventory, but those take time to build up and keep track of.