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Lo siento y Feliz Navidad

That means I’m sorry, right?  I’ve not been available to write lately, despite my commitment to do so twice a week, but I hope that I can beg your pardons.  My grandmother died at the beginning of the month, the next week I had two papers due in my very last classes of my Masters degree.  I’ve only recently gotten the Christmas tree up and decorated.  I feel that I’ve been running non-stop, because- I have.

I wanted to put out a little warning, well, really, a thought about purchasing and buying gift cards.  J and I have gone from being people who dined out quite frequently to almost never.  We can’t make peace with spending $30 on a meal.  However, we remembered we had a gift card for Landry’s restaurants, and it is one that starts to deduct from the balance if it goes unused.  We called to verify the balance, and then went out to eat after going to the mall to visit Santa.  We ordered modestly, skipping the appetizers and drinks so to be able to not go over our balance.  At the end of the meal, we whipped out the gift card and were pretty peeved when our server told us that they no longer took that particular gift card.  I called for the manager, only to be told that this vary thing had happened to other patrons.  I wondered why there was no small disclaimer on the door. In the end, he comped our daughters $2 kids meal, but we had to pull out the debit card *argh* to pay for the meal.

The moral of the story is to pull out the gift card BEFORE you order at a restaurant.  With the number of stores going out of business, I’d personally stay away from all of those that I didn’t feel totally comfortable with being there in 2009. Personally, I think gift cards are a cop-out.  You can’t opt out of the gifting process.  I don’t like receiving them, (unless of course it’s a Starbucks card).

I watched Dave last night and he said that the week before Christmas is traditionally when people start to blow Christmas budgets.  Since I buy most everything online, I’ve reached the shipping deadline, so I doubt there will be any last minute gift ideas now.  I was working on my mother a scrap book that did not get finished in time, so I had to get something online yesterday so that it will get there in time.  It wasn’t poor planning on my part.  I lost a substantial amount of time with the death of my grandmother.  I did go over what J and I said we would spend on one another.  I hope he forgives me and I have to promise to be a big girl and not be tiffy if he did the mature thing and stuck to the budget.  Next year, I’ll do better.  I doubt we’ll be debtfree, but we’re getting more financially mature every day.

We have $2800 left on one debt.  We’ve already planned to do our taxes early and pay that off and then our one and only debt will be my student loans.  We’re looking forward to a productive 2009.  I need to revisit last years resolutions.  Working on finances was one of ours.  I wonder how close we came to achieving it.

If I don’t have the opportunity to write again before the holidays are in full swing, please have a very merry Christmas and a Happy and Safe New Year.

December 18, 2008 | Filed Under Financial Planning, Just Whatever 

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