Accountant by Day

As many of you may have noticed (or even participated in!) I held a series of weekly giveaways during the month of October to celebrate the one year anniversary (or blogoversary) of AccountantByDay.com. This graph shows the visits (blue) and page views (red) by month to AccountantByDay.com from January to October. Traffic has been steadily on the rise since April, but you can see the jump in October from the giveaways.

This is the FINAL GIVEAWAY celebrating the first anniversary of AccountantByDay. This week features a $50 Amazon Gift Card prize. Please use the RaffleCopter widget below! Good luck! If you’re a new reader, start here: RafflecopterSettings = { raffleID: 'M2Y3ZWQ4NDc1MmE2YjUyNTkzMDhlZTUxZTZiM2MzOjE=' }; You need javascript enabled to see this giveaway.

Welcome to the second Accountant by Day October give away! I am giving away prizes all month to celebrate the first anniversary of Accountant by Day. Last week we gave away $25. Thanks to generous sponsors, this week’s prize is $75. If you’re new to Accountant by Day, start here! The winner will receive: $25 Amazon Gift Card from Accountant by Day $25 Amazon Gift Card from Retire by 40 – follow Joe’s plan to quit his day job before he turns 40 by investing in real estate, making income online, and building a portfolio of dividend stocks.

Thank you to everyone for promoting and participating in last week’s giveaway. The winner of the $75 prize is Anne Marie. Congratulations!   Review of 2nd giveaway: This week I did a little experiment and did not list the giveaway on online-sweepstakes.com. The results were significantly fewer visits and page views. (Visits) [Page views] 0. Week before any giveaways (736) [2,194] 1. Week of first giveaway (996) [3,295] 2. Week of second giveaway (776) [2,416]

After looking through 134 entries, the winner is Deborah. Congratulations! Look for your $75 prize arriving in your inbox any minute now! Other giveaways to enter now: My Personal Finance Journey is giving away $205! ($105 straight to readers, the other $100 to your favorite charity.) Frugal Toad's Fall Giveaway - win $50 20's Finances is giving away a $50 gift card Investorz Blog is giving away $25 Money is the Root is giving away $25 Invest it Wisely is giving away some wise advice - In Defense of Food CoupleMoney is giving away a Tablet Review of 3rd Giveaway

I’m laughing at myself now when I see that I thought I could save an extra $4,500 in cash by the end of the year. That would have been about $750 each month, starting in July. It has been four months of saving now, and I am almost at $1,000 of extra savings! At the very least, this exercise has made me more aware of how much money I actually have that is not budgeted for.

Extra Cash Flow - $257

Total extra cash saved since July: $968

In October my “extra savings” increased by $257. At the end of September, I was out $300 in reimburseable expenses from work, so essentially I had a $300 extra inflow in October that should have been attributed to September.

However, to offset this extra inflow, I managed to accidentally pay my student loan off by an extra $340! The student loan system switched websites this month, and I tried to make my usual extra payment as soon as I could log in. However, the system kept giving me an error message on the last step. I gave up, and logged back in the next week to complete the payment. THEN two payments show up on my account a few days later. Luckily I had the extra cash, and I’m fine with paying extra, otherwise I’d have been pretty upset!

At our firm, we all rank the students we meet at recruiting events. Our votes are added into a chart, and are all shown the same in the chart, so essentially, even us new hires who have only been working a few weeks getting a pretty equal vote. This means that when you get a chance to meet the staff at an accounting firm, it is important to make a good impression on as many staff members as you can.

An update to my earlier “to-do list” post: I finished 1), did not finish 2) but realized I need more directions on this one, and started one of the returns in step 3). I made pizza AND scones, ironed a couple shirts to get me through the first couple days this week, made the bed, and did another load of laundry. Checking the scones off the list made me so much happier than any of the work stuff though!

As of last week, my father is now a full-time retiree. I was sitting with him last weekend, asking him how it feels to be retired, and he started telling me how he was annoyed because his company reduced his pension payments by some metric based on how much social security he would receive. Back up a second there Dad - you get a pension AND social security? I know that I won’t be getting either!

Today is my unofficial first day of audit busy season. We flew into the client location last night, and spent the day at the client. I’m excited to be out here and starting the real work! We’ll be out here for 2 weeks. I think this is my longest time working a plane ride away. After the two weeks are up, I’ll be back home for a week, and then back on a plane to another client for a week.