April 6, 2006 – An Update on Everything

Originally posted on LiveJournal.

In an effort to collect my thoughts on what I should be doing this weekend, I’m going to just start writing what i’m working on see how far I get. I should probably start keeping a to-do list or something, as a number of my items are months long and never really disappear. Anyways, here goes.

Selling St. Pete House

Things are going pretty well with the house, except I still haven’t done half what I wanted to get done at this point. Definitely selling it, definitely not fixing it up entirely — but that’s about as far as I’ve thought things out. I’m planning on getting in touch with a new realtor as the one that I was using seems to want to BUY the house, which is a serious conflict of interest. There’s a realitor that’s a few houses down and a friend of my moms who offered to do it for 4%, not bad considering the usual is 6%, or 8%. Still worth interviewing a few more realitors before making a decision.

Buying a house in Orlando

I’d originally planned on moving everything out of the St. Pete house, selling it, then moving from the apt here to a new one, or to a house here in Orlando. Now though I’m thinking about getting a house here in Orlando sometime in july-august (lease runs out here at the end of August) then moving everything from the St. Pete house to there then. Between now and then I’d be house shopping here in Orlando, fixing up the St. Pete one to sell, getting loan and all the prep work out of the way. Think it’ll be a much more doable solution than sorting out EVERYTHING from St. Pete in storage. So buying a house before selling the other one is really just taking the easy way out. The only downside is i’d be paying 2 mortgages and rent for a month, then 2 mortgages until it’s sold off, but by then it should be ready to go on the market.

Work

Going quite well lately. My ideas on things pretty much always get pushed through and happen now, which is pretty neat. Everyone comes to me for advice, so I spend most my days answering questions though, which makes it a little hard to concentrate sometimes. I can’t decide if it’s making me arrogant or if I actually know a lot.

Money

Not sure how, but I’m not in debt anymore. Guess after paying off the cobalt flux pads and the new TV I’m back to being even; even with a mortgage payment and rent each month. I did sell my Sharebuilder stock as there’s no point in having that if you’re paying more in CC interest. :/ But yeah I’m back to being even.

Saving

Yeah I just drained what I had to break even. I did change my 401k contribution up to 15k/yr though (the max). Part is in a traditional, part in a roth; so I got to have fun reading up on all that and planning out where i’ll be financially in 42/37 years. Sadly I have planned that far ahead, but we know how much my plans change from month to month.

Car

No not the mini, the Mazda. It’s just sitting out in the parking lot still. ;/ I need to get off my ass and sell it. Unfortunately it’s co-owned by my dad, so I need to do the paperwork to transfer it to my name first. Going to try to get that sent up to him this weekend to sign over to me.

Fitness

There’s always one part of my life that doesn’t get attention while the others do — lately it’s been here. I put on a good 15 pounds in the last 6 weeks by eating great great food everyday and not exercising. Time to start working out again after work I suppose, if I can get myself back in the habit. Tried going skating last weekend but ran into some technical difficulties.^^ Did get a new pair of skates though, so going to try to start going down to blanchard on weekends again.

Web sites

I really was going about planning that social networking site all wrong. I sitll think it’s a good idea, and would be cool to make, but I need to take some smaller steps — like, oh, learning the language first. So instead, for the timebeing i’m reading Rails Recepes and trying them out. Learning a lot of functionality that wasn’t in the Agile Development With Rails book that’s blowing my mind. The new ways of doing things in rails vs php/asp/cf still blow my mind on a daily basis — or whenever I have the time to read up on it. I thought learning ruby/rails would be just a jump to the left but it’s more like being thrust into something new. :p

Taxes

Mine are done for the year, but I still need to a file a return for my mom before the 15th. I’m really hoping I don’t have to pay anything back like for mine, which I should’nt considering how many deductions she has (mortgage interest, house repairs, apt repairs, lost income from apt, me as a dependent since I was a student for half a year). Probably a lot more to it too. Luckily she did all her taxes written out by hand herself, so I can use those as templates.

Girl
Save the best for last right? Lots and lots going on with Marilyn and I lately. We’re never bored that’s for sure. Watched quite a few movies together lately. Both of us being movie buffs really works out. 🙂 Love me If you Dare, Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods, Ice Age 2 — yeah many more. Lots of showing each other our favorites at this point, so we’ve seen great movies from both sides. Playing lots of DDR and tetris worlds, poker, going swimming/hottub, bookstores, eating out, wandering around stores and all that fun stuff. We both like the same things so it’s no stretch to find things we both like. Going to see Cirque du Soleil – Delirium in two weeks which I’m really looking forward to! At the moment though she’s out of town until sunday, so maybe I’ll get a few of the things listed here out of the way. 🙂