Showing posts with label Microsoft Money. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Microsoft Money. Show all posts

Friday, November 5, 2010

Odds and Ends


My apologies for having no blog posts for almost a week until my rabies story a couple of days back and I’m trying to make up for it.
No more exercise machine purchases! That will be my rallying cry for the foreseeable future. Can you believe that in the past year, I had bought three new exercise machines? First there was the treadmill, then the elliptical machine, and just recently, the spinning bike. That’s what happens when you can barely run and have to find endorphin producing substitutes. Please, no mas! Maybe I can save some money now.
Trying to purge some clutter from my tiny closet, I finally moved all of the old cotton marathon and half marathon t-shirts to the storage cabinet in the garage and retained only the 2 technical ones. A few years ago, I disposed of the old 5K, 10K, 10 Mile shirts. Or maybe they are still in the deep recesses of the garage storage cabinet.
I woke up early last Friday morning at 6 o’clock (that’s early for me) and started updating Microsoft Money financial software to track my bottom line. It was something which I should have done at the end of last quarter but I kept procrastinating.  Well the bottom line didn’t get too far up from the bottom. Earnings have been paltry compared to the stock market boom a decade ago. I didn’t finish updating until 9:30 and started working out late on the spinning bike. The exercise helped the fight against the inflation of my bottom.
The other week, there was a sale on adult technical compression long sleeved, mock turtle neck shirts at Target for $16. They were the store brand of Target named Champion. Comparatively speaking, if you were to buy a major label like Under Armour, it would have cost more than double for similar fabric and quality. Then last week, Target had another sale but in the children’s section. Same Champion brand but this time a mid-layer microfleece long sleeved shirt with a quarter zip at the neck. I tried on the large and extra large children’s sizes and they fit me perfectly. The price: $9.00. This is one time that being a person of small stature has its advantages. Besides, it’s nice to be able to wear these form-fitting shirts without showing unnecessary bulges where you don’t want them.
            Is it possible to exercise more than necessary that your weight goes too low and it borders on being unhealthy? That’s what happened last Saturday. After running for an hour and fifteen minutes and shedding so much sweat, my weight as an adult reached an astounding all-time low of 112.8 pounds. As much as I like to keep my weight down, that was way too low for me. I immediately consumed about 4 pounds of fluids in the next couple of hours. By Sunday, I was back to my acceptable weight and made it up even more at the Halloween party later.

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Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Filing My 2009 Income Taxes


Aside from watching all those movies last week (http://noeldlp.blogspot.com/2010/02/movies-watched-in-past-week.html), I also managed to update my financial software (Microsoft Money) and do my income taxes using the free online tax preparation software from TaxACT (http://www.taxact.com/). I’ve prepared my own taxes in the past several years using software purchased from stores, except for last year when I downloaded the free TaxACT software. This year, I decided to try to use their online software. They offer free Federal E-file like most do plus a small amount for State filing. To my friends in the Philippines - we pay Federal taxes to the U.S. government plus State taxes to California. Filling out the forms were not too much of a problem since I had most of my income and expenses for 2009 in a Manila envelope already. I got that idea from a finance columnist in a newspaper years ago. At the start of the year, prepare an envelope and keep all your income and expenses in it so at the end of the year you don’t have to look high and low for them when you are ready to file your income taxes. Aside from the time it took to type in the data into the software and reading the instructions carefully, it was a pretty easy process. Despite a huge budget deficit, the government still managed to add some credits to reduce our payments. One had something to do with still being employed, and the other was about still owning your home without going into foreclosure (that’s how I interpreted them anyway). After a few days of waiting to make sure there weren't any more end of the year bank statements forthcoming, I filed both Federal and State taxes on February 11th and within a couple of hours got confirmation by email that both were accepted by the government. I will now be awaiting a little refund. How little? Well, I can’t tell you how much I’m going to get back from the Federal taxes, but I’m getting $4.00 back from California! Woohoo! I’m rich!
Speaking of year end statements, I got a 5 cent check from Vanguard Investments after I transferred funds from a regular account to a Roth IRA. It cost them 44 cents postage to mail a 5 cent check. Unbelievable!
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