I did have my annual-once-again Halloween tea party earlier this month, and it was the one of the best low-key gatherings I’ve hosted in a long time. We didn’t spend too much over our usual grocery budget, either. Unfortunately I did purchase fabric for a costume that I didn’t have time to make, but I can just pop it in the fabric box for next year. I’ll consider it a Halloween investment rather than merely a spending failure. Hah!
This month I:
- Paid for half of my Patreon pledges using money earned doing surveys.
- Finally found a plain white 100% cotton tablecloth for a decent price. It was new in the package with a $30 price tag, but I got it on eBay for $11. I couldn’t have gotten comparable fabric so inexpensively — and this way I didn’t need to hem it, either.
- Remembered to use the points on my Walgreens card before they expired, plus a coupon, which gave me a total $5 discount on my crazy-expensive-but-dentally-necessary specialty mouthwash.
- Got a free packet of M & Ms and a free pouch of potato soup mix with my Kroger card.
- Painstakingly downloaded most of a Hall & Oates greatest hits album for free using the Freegal service through the Houston Public Library. I can download five MP3 tracks a week, DRM free — they’re mine to keep. It usually takes several weeks to get a full album, but if you’re patient you can get a lot of great music. I don’t think I’ve mentioned Freegal on here before, but I use it as a way to download music I like but wouldn’t really pay for — which for me, oddly enough, generally means greatest hits albums. But not always! Within the last year I’ve downloaded David Bowie, Johnny Cash, Psychedelic Furs, Simon & Garfunkel, Arcade Fire, and a lot of assorted classical music. You can’t always find exactly what you want in their somewhat limited catalogue, but you can always find something interesting.
- Downloaded two free fonts and several graphics sets from Creative Market (including the photo above, which I obviously made awful with text). This is another resource for free stuff I’ve never managed to mention here! They have six free items every week — photos, fonts, blog templates, and more. I generally use these things for my own amusement (I am not a graphic designer of any sort), but I like the stuff on Creative Market so much that I’ve purchased my last 3 or 4 WordPress blog templates there.
- Watched a free horror movie on Google Play and used a coupon code to get a $1.99 streaming rental of “Logan.”
- Got a referral for a new private bookkeeping client, which should bring in a little extra income in 2018.
- Did a few tarot readings for a little extra income, too.
- Had a free drink on my Starbucks card.
- Watched 3 DVDs and read 24 eBooks from the library. The library is the best thing in the entire universe. (I only paid $13.70 on all of my other reading, which was at least an improvement over this year’s monthly average.)
I’m participating in National Novel Writing Month again this year, so I assume I’ll be doing more writing than spending in November. But we’ll see! Sometimes I manage my writing time so poorly that we end up eating more take out. Whoops!