I had a thought this morning. I want to cut off/pay off debts to free up more spending/saving cash these days; I’ve been trying to figure out ways to do this without losing the services I want and love. Right now I have three mortgages on the house (it sounds stupid, but hear me out: One mortgage was for about $5,000 on the down-payment; this was through the neighborhood improvement association in conjunction with Crestar, which guaranteed locking in the mortgages at 6%. The balance is with First Union. The third was an improvement loan to pay for the HVAC and basement wiring last year) and I pay three different banks each month.

What I thought was to see how much the balance on the Crestar (now SunTrust) loan is, and pay that mother off. That would free up $55/mo. Plus, I’m going to be shutting off the DSS service this month, which is an additional $33/mo.

I already shut off the second phone line to the house, which saves roughly $35/mo. and almost pays for the DSL line; my Verizon bill is dramatically smaller now. Unfortunately BGE hiked my payment plan to $99 for the increase in heating bills this winter, so I’m losing some cash there. Thank godI paid off the Scout loan last year and got the Visa bill back down to a reasonable amount. That will be the next plan of attack.

Note to self: Amazing Foods’ Cha-Cha-Chili may be tasty, but it gives me intolerable gas.

PowerMax has a Used Beige Power Mac G3/233 DT 32MB/4GB/CD for $549.
A Used Power Mac G3/350 64MB/6GB/DVD/56K/KB (Blue and White) is $949.
Lower end G4’s go for about $1K; a Used PowerBook G3 250MHz 48MB/5GB/CD/FD/12.1″ is $999.
Then again, hell, a new Power Mac G4/400 64MB/10GB/DVD-ROM/56k is $1199.

If I thought I had it bad the other day at the ER, here’s a funny story from another person about their experience.

Random memory:
Working in the doctor’s office at Cidera, the week after we moved into the new building, on the old side. I was in an old exam room, with linoleum-over-cement floors, white walls, and a big doctor’s door. Overhead flourescents which I turned off and replaced with Christmas lights, one main desk and two banquet tables stacked next to each other. I put my desk in the middle of the room facing the door and worked like that, with the door closed. It was a few weeks before they moved us into the cave, over on the far side of the new building, and the first office after moving in with Tina and Alison. I spent a month there, through Christmas and into the first week of January. The album of the month was Orbital’s In Sides.