The clinic that I work at several days a week has opened a satellite clinic. I started working there today. This week I’m going to be there today, tomorrow afternoon, and Saturday morning. There are hardly any appointments since it is a new clinic. I’ll be looking for things to do to kill the boredom. (There’s no internet access. I’m at the library right now.)

This morning I watched the movieTalk To Me. I’ve had that from Netflex for a while but never got around to watching it. Loved it.

I came to the library to get more movies. This is a good library but it turns out that the movie selection is pathetic. I got HOLES. I’ve never seen that. I was hoping to get a stack of movies to get me through the next several days but that’s not happening.

When we went to my parents’ this weekend we spent the drive up listening to the audiobook version of The Millionaire Next Door. It was interesting. If you haven’t read it it is a study of American millionaires that shows that most of them are middle class people who were able to save a lot of money by living frugally. It has a lot of case studies about high earners who squander their money (think my ex) and people on lower incomes working to save (what I want to be). It took forever to listen to because it would play for a few minutes then the SO would turn it off and we’d discuss. One of the big things that it talked about was wealthy parents giving their adult children Economic Outpatient Care (EOC). To sum it up the authors are totally against it for a variety of reasons. Before we leave the parents my mother hands me $200 because she wanted to contribute to Spirit’s cremation. The SO managed to hold it together until we got back in the car. He went off about how we listened to all this stuff and agreed on it and then I go and take money from my parents. I told him that I told her that it was already paid for but she wanted to contribute both in his memory and because they think that I’m flat broke no matter what I tell them. There is no turning the money down. Those people are sneaky. It would show up in the mail next. We decided to take the money and open an account to save for adoption. Any EOC from either side of the family will go in here. That will serve the dual purpose of giving us something useful to do with the money and not offending the parent people by turning it down. I’ll be running to the bank later to open up the account – yet another boredom filler.

I also picked up a copy of Millionaire Women Next Door by the same authors. I basically know all the general ideas for saving money but reading these kind of thing inspire me. So far, I’ve rearranged my financial life to decrease the amount of money that I spend on things like insurance (by shopping around better) and am applying the savings to my car loan so I will pay that off quickly. Once that’s paid off then all the money goes to my student loan. After that’s paid off then I’m debt free. I’ve also started a retirement savings plan. I had one when I started working but when I got married the ex didn’t believe in saving money. He was a spender and there wasn’t enough extra to save (I thought) and he got angry anytime I brought up savings. So I’ve started a new plan and rolled over the old one into it. The SO is freaked out by the lack of savings that I have. But what he can’t fully realize is that a year ago when the ex walked out I had about $300 to my name and I had just pretty much quit my jobs in anticipation of adopting in a few weeks. To be able to get this much accomplished in a year is pretty amazing.