Accountant by Day

Well, this was a long week. Don’t even get me started on Delta and our delayed/canceled flights this week. To be fair, Delta doesn’t control the weather, but it feels like they make it happen on purpose… Anyway, I got a paycheck this week, which is always exciting - but this one included a small holiday bonus! Even more exciting, and completely unexpected on my part. I’ve been working on launching a website to promote some of my artwork.

This week I will be taking a couple of days off (actually, downgraded this to 1.5 days) to attend a wedding. What nobody tells you about PTO is that you’re just going to have to stay late enough and come in the weekend before your trip to get enough work done to be able to leave! Okay, so maybe that’s not a secret, but just something you don’t realize ‘til you work in an office.

This is my busiest busy season so far. I have been allowed to manage (with supervision) two jobs where I am out at a client, with a staff member that I have to manage. It turns out it’s really hard to get the audit done when a) I am working on all the sections that I don’t have much experience with, since the staff is now doing the easy sections and b) the staff needs help/questions answered/audit tests explained.

Now that we’re past tax season, it’s time to review some finances. This sort of post is my personal motivation mechanism, so feel free to skip if this is not your sort of thing. My last mortgage post was back in May, when I decided to pay an additional $500 in principal each month, to speed up reaching the 22% equity needed to stop paying PMI. I also thought that I could put $500 per month towards savings/investments.

September was a disappointing month for tracking cash flow - I ended down $40! To be fair, I have an outstanding reimbursable expense of $300, which will be paid this Friday, but cash flow is cash flow, and even if I’d received that $300 by the end of the month, I would have missed my target by quite a bit. I had $400 in blog income in September, which means that extra savings should have been at least $400.

Enter this week's giveaway for a chance to win $75! ------------------------------------------------------------------- We recently had our annual reviews at work, and as part of the process, we were asked to set some goals for the upcoming year. By all accounts, these goals are not really followed up on by management, but I put some thought into my goals anyway, because they’re MY goals and it’s MY responsibility to follow up on them.

I have a friend here who has just moved to the U.S. from Europe. He has a good job, but struggled to get a credit card. When he did get approved for one, his credit limit was $300. He was lucky though - he has some other foreign friends here, who could only get prepaid credit cards when they moved to the U.S. Tough for them, but seems reasonable right?

I have never owned a home, so I thought I would outline this situation and hope that some of you out there have some experience renovating and renting out homes, and can tell me if this is a totally naive proposal: The beginning Our land lord is thinking about selling the house my roommates and I live in, so I started doing some market research about homes in our area. The thing is, my neighborhood is kind of “up and coming.

So I’m sitting in my German class, trying to learn some German, and a baby starts screaming in the hallway. For the entire 2.5 hours we are in the building, this baby is screaming on and off. After about an hour and a half of this, mom-of-screaming-baby finally takes the baby outside of the building, but the way our classroom is set up, she was just outside of our window anyway.

The following is a guest post by Denise Gabbard from Write and Get Paid. Write and Get Paid was created to help other writers get started in the world of online writing, find paying work, get hired, build a client base, and make a good living. It offers advice on all stages of a writer’s journey, but is especially helpful to those who are new to the internet. Six Motivators for Productivity