How to Oversleep

If I am expert at any one thing, I would have to say it is how to oversleep.

Oversleeping can take many forms. During the school year, when I have to be up for work at a given time every morning, I perfect the art of the snooze and dash. While it may be difficult to master, it is in essence a very simple thing. It involves setting an alarm clock then –here’s the delicate part – when the morning comes, hitting the snooze button. Repeatedly. You must hit the snooze button every five minutes (or seven, or whatever interval your particular alarm clock designates) until finally you hit the exact last moment you could possibly wake up and still get to work. You then must sit bolt upright in bed, hop out of bed, and move with the speed of a comic book hero through your entire morning routine, in an sort of unconscious flurry which provides a frightening fluidity, until you find yourself in your car.

My record was 10 minutes, from bed to door, fully dressed with book bag and full coffee cup in hand.

In the summer, oversleeping takes a different form for me. In the summer, you see, there is no moment of panic. There’s no dash. It’s just a slow realization that, even though I once again set an alarm for 9 in the hopes of having a full and productive day, it’s 10:45 and I should probably get up.

So how do I accomplish these overwhelming feats of oversleeping? Here are some simple tips to help you accomplish it every time.

1. Stay up as late as possible. When I have to wake up at 6, 12 will do the trick. 1 is better. If you have trouble staying up this late, consider the use of caffeine at night or intense aerobic exercise after dinner.

2. Make your bed as comfortable as possible and the rest of your home as uncomfortable as possible. There’s nothing like waking up in a frigid room to make you want to stay in bed for just a few more minutes.

3. Cultivate a snooze habit. This is the big one. If you start by letting yourself snooze the alarm (just once . . okay, maybe once more), then you will absolutely find yourself snoozing again the next day. Pretty soon you will be able to hit snooze without even knowing you’re doing it, and then you will guarantee that you will oversleep.

4. Set your alarm much much earlier than you really need to get up. If you have to get out the door by 6:30, and know that it takes you about half an hour to eat breakfast and get ready for work, then set your alarm no later than 5:15. It will give you that extra urge to hit snooze the first few times, and once you get past those first few, it’s a breeze to keep doing it.

5. Do something you dislike or dread first thing in the morning. Avoid anything pleasant or worth looking forward to at least until after lunch.

6. Keep all light out of your bedroom. Make sure that when you wake up at 8 in the morning, your room looks exactly like what it would look like if you accidentally woke up at 4 in the morning.

7. Make sure your spouse is a comrade in arms on this one. Nothing will keep you from enjoying a good oversleeping than a significant other forcibly pushing you out of bed and saying “no really, get up!” You should instead advise the party in question to encourage you to cuddle when your alarm goes off.

I suppose if, for some reason, you didn’t want to oversleep in the morning, you could reverse these tips, but why would anyone want to do that?

Addicted to saving money?

I think I have a problem. I spend hours every day at my computer, reading and writing about money. I keep a blog and I write about money. I read about 6-10 blogs a day, all about money. I participate in 2-3 forums, all of which are about money. I listen to podcasts about money, I watch video clips about money, I read books about money, I search for articles that will tell me how to save money. I click and click and click.

When did it all become about the money?

I am saving money, it’s true. I’m making some money too, between the clicking and the writing, but the truth is I don’t feel like I’m a very interesting person right now. A lot of it, I know, is the anxiety, but I’m just tired of walking around all day thinking about saving money. I want to play, I want to read a book that has nothing to do with money, I want to write poetry again.

Does this mean I want to stop saving money? No, of course not. But the truth is, the reading is not what is saving me the money, it’s the doing. I may find one or two more little tricks to save money, but the truth is I already know most of what I need to know to save money. I just need to get off my rear end, shut off the computer, and do them. I need to have more time in my life, more life in my life. I’m saving money so I can afford to do things I love, but I’m not doing things I love.

It seems like anymore, I don’t save money to be able to afford what I need or want. I save money to save money, for the thrill of saving the money. After a while, it does become like an addiction, where my tolerance level rises. The same amount of savings stops being enough, stops providing the thrill. I need more, more, more. That’s not healthy.

It’s pretty easy to lose perspective. I think a lot of us have a tendency to fixate on one or a few things that are important to us. It’s important, though, to remember to balance that with other things.

Break Even Week 4 Update

I am so close.

This week, I made exactly $420. Exactly my break even number. If I had stayed strictly to my budget, this would have been the first week I’d broken even. Bud I didn’t.

This week, as I said yesterday I overspent my grocery budget. I overspent my entertainment budget a little too because we went out to dinner Thursday night (on serious travel burnout) and then again for our typical Saturday night dinner with friends. The interesting thing for me is that even though we went out twice, we were only $10 over our entertainment budget, when in past weeks we’ve done a lot worse than that. Maybe it was coming back from being away, maybe it was because we’d been to restaurants with our parents so much, but I realized Thursday night that we can have nice dinners we really like and giant sweet teas at the deli for only $15 for the two of us. And we like the deli. We really like it there, we love their tea, the food is always more than sufficient (and for $15 we got huge “I spent 11 hours on a plane and have only eaten one meal today” dinners). $15 for dinner makes us really happy. So why are we spending so much more than that?

I also made a lot more money this week than I have. Since my weeks run Thursday to Wednesday, this week included a marketing workshop I did for my employer, which paid significantly more than usual. I also had a rebate come in and some other things. I’m including my interest to my ING account which paid out, since the end of the month fell within this week.

Payouts are also coming in from things long since done. I got a $25 payout from Helium today, which I requested about a month ago and which I’ve been earning since January. I also got a very unexpected $3 payout from Daytipper from a tip I submitted at least 6 months ago and never expected to be compensated for.

I still need to do better though. I started a second class today, and have another one starting next weekend, so I’m going to go from working 6 hours a week at my part time job to about 18. More and more, the realization is coming that I’m just going to have to work for my money, but again 18 hours is something I can easily live with and I’m very grateful that it’s available.

I applied for a couple of online keyword writing jobs this week as well, and I am going to try to spend more time writing for Associated Content. Hopefully, if I get enough things going, pretty soon I will start to see some actual progress (and maybe even catch up a bit).

$420 Break even number
+$10 Entertaiment overbudget
+$70 Grocery overbudget
-$370 Teaching/tutoring
-$5 Essay Grading
-$10 Rebate
-$7 ING interest
-$.07 Paypal Dividends
-$25 Helium
-$3 Daytipper
Deficit $80
Total for summer: $799 deficit

Food, Money, and Love

I am embarrassed to report that I spent $120 on groceries this week. That’s $70 over my grocery budget or almost 2.5 times what I wanted to spend. Part of it was that we were just coming back from vacation and your cupboards were bare, part of it was because we bought some pricier need items that we don’t buy very often (an 8 pack of paper towel rolls, the last one of which by my count has lasted about 8 months and is not in earnest gone yet, a roll of wax paper, an enormous bottle of mouthwash), but mostly it was for one big reason. I took my husband with me.

Now, I’ve read lots of grocery money saving articles that say the tip for saving money is, “Leave your husband at home.” This doesn’t work for me. My husband really likes grocery shopping. He doesn’t like it the way I like it. I consider it a game, stalking the bargains, stacking coupons and deals, seeing how much food I can get in my cart for a given amount of money. He considers it an extravaganza. “Look at all this wonderful food!” he says, in a variety of ways, as he walks through the store touching everything his eyes alight.

I’ve won him over in a lot of ways towards grocery couponing. As we walk down the aisles, he’ll usually say “do you have coupons for this?” instead of “can I try this?” He keeps a mental pricebook for dry goods which is much more complex and complete than anything I can keep on paper. When he realizes I’ve found a great catalina deal or drugstore rebate deal, he’ll drive me from store to store, or even take turns going into the store with me because he knows I’m shy of “spinning” deals. He really is a big help.

His weakness, or maybe his strength, has to do with meat. He loves meat. He loves eating it, he loves preparing it and boy does he love BUYING it. Not just any meat though. Good meat. He loves finding bargains on things that I would never have dreamed of buying in the first place. “Look! This Angus beef T-bone steak is one third off!” Yeah, and still costs as much as the rest of the groceries in my cart.
So this week, he got that look on his face, the look that means we’re in for a meat festival in our home. “I’ve decided,” he says, after we’ve been grocery shopping and I’ve slightly exceeded the weekly budget, “that this week I’m going to buy the Pork Tenderloin.”

The Pork Tenderloin deserves caps because, for my husband, this tenderloin is a legend. He saw it at Sam’s Club and immediately started devising hundreds of uses he could find for it, and formulating exactly how he wanted the butcher to cut it. It really is a fairly reasonable price (which, being his territory, slips my memory for the moment), but it’s a huge chunk out of the budget. I could see there was no arguing with him though, so I sighed and got back in the car. An hour later we left Sam’s with the Pork Tenderloin (8 pounds), 6 pounds of ground beef, 6 pounds of boneless, skinless chicken breasts, a bag of nectarines, a case of applesauce, five pounds of carrots, and I don’t quite remember what else. We spent another $60. Ugh.

I was frustrated, I was angry, I was anxious. I didn’t know what to do, as my husband sat next to my, grinning and glowing about his great finds and chirping about exactly how he was going to prepare them. He didn’t let me down either, by the end of the weekend, we had a freezer full of 3 different kinds of burgers, pork chops, meatloaf mix, and cubed pork for chili and barbecue. “We don’t need to buy meat for a month!” he said. (To me it looks like longer than a month.) If I can get him to wait a whole month before buying more meat anyway, it will be a major accomplishment.

But I can’t be mad. As I watched him cheerfully pack burgers (frugally, I may add, with breadcrumbs, vegetables, and sauce added to each mix), and babble about all the good food we could eat, I started to realize why buying meat makes him so happy. This is one more way in which he provides for me, when as a student he often feels like he doesn’t completely do so financially. He is filling our freezer with food as a sign of love, as a way of offering me security. And in a way, it does that. Even though he spent a lot, he did get reasonably good deals on the food, and it is nice to have a freezer full of food, to know that if something goes wrong, or our budget goes awry, we will at the very least, eat.

So I kissed him and thanked him for the food, and went off to try to redo our budget for the rest of the month with the same amount of love.

Happy independence day

To my fellow American readers and bloggers: Happy Independence Day! Celebrate by spending time with your family, eating at a cookout, watching fireworks, but most importantly by enjoying and celebrating our Independence and Freedom and remembering what made it possible and what it stands for. We must constantly preserve that freedom by listening, observing, speaking, taking action, voting, and being part of the system. We have the right to say and believe what we want; it would be ungrateful for us not to avail ourselves of it.

And for all my readers, everywhere: Find your own independence. Find your own freedom. May we all be on the way to being completely free in our lives, completely financially and personally independent (and amazingly interdependent as well).

Once more, Happy Independence everyone.