a close-up of a sign

Work from Home Diary 10: Jigsaw Puzzles Make Me Happy

Posted on by . 4 Replies

Updated at 4:40pm PT on 5/3: I finished the last puzzle (1,000 piece Bird Village) and posted the photo at the bottom of the post.

Good afternoon everyone, long time no blog.  I hope you had a great weekend and your week is off to a great start.  I started sharing my thoughts regarding working from home in a series of Work from Home Diary posts.  Feel free to share your work from home feelings in the comments section below.  For today’s update, I wanted to share my obsession with jigsaw puzzles.  When you spend most of the day / week / month inside, there is only so much TV you can watch.

Laura and I received 4 puzzles as Easter gifts so I decided to spend a few hours over the last 2 weeks working on the puzzles.  The first 2 puzzles had 300 pieces and took about 2 hours to finish.  The third puzzle had 500 pieces and took about 3 hours to finish.  I just started the last puzzle which has 1,000 pieces and it should take me 7-10 hours to finish.  I started with the easy 300 piece puzzles and liked the flowers, birds, and butterflies in this puzzle.

a puzzle with a garden scene

Ravensburger Puzzle Spring Awakening 300 Pieces – https://www.ravensburger.us/products/jigsaw-puzzles/adult-puzzles/spring-awakening-13584/index.html

Continue reading →

a close-up of a sign

Work from Home Diary 9: My Judgmental Exercise Bike

Posted on by . 8 Replies

Good morning everyone, I hope your weekend is going well.  I started sharing my thoughts regarding working from home in a series of Work from Home Diary posts.  Feel free to share your work from home feelings in the comments section below.  For today’s update, I wanted to talk about my judgemental exercise bike.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about the strange things I recently purchased on Amazon.  Since we knew we would be staying at home more during the next few weeks, we decided to purchase an exercise bike.  My wife was interested in a Peloton exercise bike, but I talked her down from $2,000 to $200.  After doing some research, we decided to purchase a Stamina Wonder Exercise Bike from Amazon (the price has actually dropped from $200 down to $180).  The Stamina exercise bike did not have all the bells and whistles of top of the line Peloton bikes, but it had pretty good reviews, could be folded and moved easily, and the price was right.  We also purchased a floor mat from Amazon to protect the floor underneath the exercise bike.

a green exercise bike with black seat

Continue reading →

a black letter on a white background

Save 20% on Trim Cable / TV / Internet / Phone Bill Negotiations (Use Code trimsave20 – Promo Expires April 25)

Posted on by . 3 Replies

Good afternoon everyone, happy Friday.  I just received an email from Trim regarding a promo that they are running through April 25 where you can get 20% off your next bill negotiation.  If you are not familiar with Trim, Trim will reach out to your cable / TV / internet / phone company on your behalf and negotiate a lower monthly cost or get you a 1 time courtesy credit (like the $15 credit I received from Xfinity in February).  In exchange for negotiating a lower rate, Trim takes a cut of the savings.  For more info, please check out this post from 2 months ago: Trim Saved Me Another $15 on my Comcast Xfinity Cable Bill.  Every few months, Trim will contact Comcast Xfinity on my behalf and negotiate a lower monthly bill or find a promo I am eligible for.  I do not have to do anything other than sit back and wait for the savings.

In this post, I will show you how to create a new bill for Trim to track and how to apply the promo code.

a screenshot of a website

Continue reading →

a black and grey recycle bin with black text

PSA: Check Amazon Gift Card Balance for Missed Allowance Reloads

Posted on by . 13 Replies

Good afternoon everyone, I hope your week is going well.  Since I have several credit cards and only use a few on a daily basis, I put small recurring charges on some of my cards so that the credit card statements are generated every month.  I do this for a 3 main reasons:

  1. If you do not use no annual fee credit cards for several months, the bank may decide that you do not need that credit card and may close it automatically for you.
  2. I have 2 Bank of America Better Balance Rewards Credit Cards (no longer available) where I get a quarterly bonus of $30 per card (I have a linked BofA checking account) for making a purchase and paying my bill on time.  I don’t want to manually make a purchase or risk forgetting to make a monthly purchase on those cards.  It’s an easy $30 bonus x 4 quarters x 2 cards = $240 cash.
  3. I have credit card referral links on my blog and if a reader signs up for the card using my referral link, I get a referral bonus (airline miles or hotel points).  The bonus points do not automatically transfer to the airline or hotel account if a credit card statement is not generated.

For those reasons, I use Amazon Allowance to automatically charge $5 to several cards every month.  The funds are automatically added to my Amazon gift card balance and I usually receive several of the below emails on the 15th of the month.  But unfortunately, for some reason, I only received 2 emails, instead of the usual 8.  I did some digging and it looks like only 2 of my Amazon Allowances processed correctly and the 8 other allowances were skipped.  If you have allowances set up, I recommend checking your Amazon account to see if they processed correctly.

a screenshot of a gift card

Continue reading →

a close-up of a sign

Work from Home Diary 8: My First Quarantine Haircut

Posted on by . 9 Replies

Good morning everyone, I hope you all had a great Easter weekend.  I started sharing my thoughts regarding working from home in a series of Work from Home Diary posts.  Feel free to share your work from home feelings in the comments section below.  For today’s update, I wanted to share my experience getting a (quarantine) haircut at home.  I included many photos below.

This is the start of week 6 of working from home for me and week 5 for Laura.  We have converted our dining room table into a (sometimes messy) coworking space and I am proudly drinking from my favorite mug.  If you can’t see what it says, it say “I don’t need Google, my wife knows everything.”  I haven’t decided if it is ironic or accurate, but it is a great mug (and was on sale).  When we are not working from home, we like to go on a short walk around the neighborhood to stretch our legs, get some fresh air, and maybe see a few birds by the lake.

If you want to see my before and after haircut pics, please keep reading.

Continue reading →