Goodbye for a little while

My blog is going on a little hiatus.

I have been struggling to keep up with things of late - nothing is wrong, but with work and an enormous amount of study, keeping posting unforunately isn't at the high end of my priorities.

At the moment, I work 35 hours a week, and with the number of courses I'm doing, I "meant" to study a crazy 60 hours a week. In about 2 weeks, that will drop back to 36 hours a week as some of my courses are finishing, but with full-time work it's still a struggle. I don't actually study 60 hours per week, but particularly as I took a weekend "off" last week to go away, my life for the last few weeks has been work until 5ish, go home, and work on assignments until anywhere from midnight to 4am because not having studied the amount I should be, I have left them to the last minute.

I'm not closing my blog and hopefully once study cuts down a bit I'll have more time.

I'm still keeping track of my spending, but with my insane hours of late I have been buying too many "little luxuries" - i.e. fast food/magazines etc.

I haven't even updated July figures yet, but a quick overall picture:

I currently have 3 credits cards, owing around $19,000.

Next pay I will get my regular pay plus $2,000 for study costs, so I will be paying off Credit Card 2.

When my tax refund comes through, (i.e. when I finally finish my tax), that should be almost $10K. So I'll pay off Credit Card 3.

Then, it is just Credit Card 4, which has a balance transfer rate.

My aim will be to start the new year with less than $5,000K debt, which is more than achievable.

Blog update

Very behind in updates. Still sick, actually took a sick day yesterday, my first one since being at this job (although I did still do some work from home).

Back at work today but still not 100%.

Literally spent almost the entire weekend in bed, (apart from bathroom breaks and occassionally getting food).

There are a lot of things I want to do this financial year, including more regular updates to my blog and get some more readers/commenters. I've never aimed to have my blog make me any money; one of the reasons I've never set up adsense or anything, but I would still like to know some people are reading. There is a book I've seem on Amazon about Blogger, but am going to try to save the money and see if I can just get some tips online and through trial and error!

Progress Bars

I've started making progress bars for my blog. It is great to visually see how much you have paid off/saved. EG: I've been thinking I've barely made a dent in my credit card debt, but I have paid off almost 14%. That isn't to be sneezed at.

A huge thanks to Stacking Pennies, who posted a blog entry on how to make the progress bars. (I'm pretty incompetent when it comes to html!)

Slack slack slack

I've been very slack with my blog lately. It was one of my things to do this long weekend and it's already Monday! Back to work tomorrow.

The long weekend has gone far too quickly. I still have most of today, but I have study to do, going to force myself to go to the gym as well.

Work is getting busy, I went in and did a bit of stuff on Friday even though it was a public holiday. I look back and how many hours I was working last year, and the 3 hours travelling I was doing a day and wonder how I did it? But it wasn't exactly good healthwise.

I work at the one place but have taken on some extra work to try to get some extra income (marking assignments - joyful task!) So add that to the two post-grad degrees I'm doing and things get pretty busy! I made up a schedule a couple of weeks ago ... yeah, that hasn't really been followed.

Anyway, no matter how busy I am, this recent Dilbert joke puts things in perspective!

Blogger time settings

On a completely random note, I need to work out how to change the time on Blogger - it is currently Tuesday afternoon in Sydney, but in Blogger world it is still Monday....