January challenge update #2.

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Do you want to know how Sideshow Bob looks in real life??

That's what I'm getting for taking a shower right before bed and then being too lazy to dry my frizzy hair. At least I didn't have to rush in the morning to get ready for work or something. This frizz was not easy to tame. No laughing...OK, you can laugh. Because that's what I did when I saw myself in the mirror today :)

OK, now onto January Decluttering and Low/No spend Challenge update:

FINANCIAL. My goals this month was to spend no more than $465 ($15 a day) on food, necessities, eating out, clothes, entertainment, gifts and miscellaneous. As of today we spent $231.87 which is about $7 over my goal. Yes, I broke my $10 goal for this week today :) There were just a couple of things that we needed. But I stayed under $30. And I'm not planning to shop for the rest of the week, so I'm not too concerned about being a little over.

A mini-challenge this week: Bring in some extra income one way or another!

We did pretty good this week. First, I discovered a new place to sell stuff. Have you ever heard of local 24/7 yard sales on Facebook?? They rock! Just to check it out, go on Facebook and enter your city/town and then 24/7 yard sale, and see if it's available in your area. Within hours I sold two shelves and have another item pending. So I made $20 for the shelves (that I originally purchased two years ago for $15 and used in our closet until we re-did it). To be honest, I spent $5 of them for kids' DVDs but the savings were, probably, at least 5- times more, so I'm happy. Now I'm just looking for more stuff to sell here :)

Another way how we "made" money this week is a whole other story. This month a promotional discount for our Internet expired, and the price jumped up from $20/ a month (to $40). Ugh!! So Hubby gave them a call, and they said that there was nothing they could do for us. So we started shopping around. We found another place with a promotional price of Internet of $24.99. So my husband calls our company back. You, probably, already guessed the outcome :) Yes, we got our discount. But the funny thing was when Hubby called them back, the CS guy told him that he needed to contact their loyalty department. Well, when he tried to dial, it went straight to a recording. Once...twice...third time...But then Hubby had already had it with customer service. Between waiting and lack of help, he was on the phone for about two hours. So he decided instead of calling customer service back (and wait for 40 minutes on the line), to do an online chat instead. He explained to them that he needed to get hold of their loyalty department. And they told him a trick! Apparently, in order for him to get somebody on the phone, he needed to call their phone back and then select the "cancel account" option. No more recordings after that. That easy :)

So even though our monthly payments went up $5, we saved another $15 every month (and that equals $180 a year in savings). Not bad at all :)

DECLUTTERING.

I already posted about major paper organizing we did HERE.  But I also did a mini-challenge too which was:

Clean out your junk drawer and post before & after photos.

So here's a "before" picture:

The crazy thing is that I clean this drawer like every year and it goes back to it. So I was wondering if I could do something different to organize the stuff in it. The simplest solution seemed to be to buy a kitchen silverware organizer (from the $ store), so everything has it's place. I hope, this time the order will last a little bit longer. Here's the after picture:

I had no idea we had so much tape!! It does help to organize things. You might find gems there (or, maybe,just enough tape to last you for the next two years :)

So there you have it! And how was your week?