A coffee-girl's bag

This weekend was somehow odd. On the one hand it was relaxing and cool and one the other hand I feel like someone stole time from me.
We visited my sister to catch my mother's products which we will return to her next weekend. The time I spent at my sisters house was great. The kids are lovely and everything is mostly uncomplicated. On our way home I had some "swedish moments". We didn't use the highway so I had plenty of time to watch the scenery. The canola is blossoming at the moment, plainly beautiful.  Hmm, I miss Sweden....
Maybe I will be there soon.
I will be on a business trip during the upcoming week so I finished up some tasks that had been open. One of them was the coffee-girls bag made out of coffee packages and some velvet.

I really like how it turned out also it's a bit bigger than planed but you know a women's handbag cannot be big enough.

I'll probably be gone for some days, so take care. I'll post as soon as I'm back from the trip.
Greetings Me.

I went shoe shopping...

... and for the first time in my life I loved it. I never liked shoe shopping. A colleague once said that I'm the only woman he knows who left the biggest shoe shop in town without having spent a cent.

Today was different, I had a target, I found it, bought it, and here are the shoes I am in love with:

I wanted to have black ones but they were sold out. So I considered all possible options:

• black and pink
• black and grey
• corral and gold
• plain white
• purple white
• blue white

and ended up with blue white. :)

If shopping shoes always creates this magnificent feeling in all the other women I really do understand why some have more shoes than clothes.

Greetings Me.

Coolest pin-board pins ever

Aren't they cool? Unfortunately, my keyboard died Saturday night. I don't know why I really loved it and cared for it. I even cleaned it. Well, that's probably the last part of being a geek....
After figuring out that the keyboard is responsible for the drrrr sound, I tried everything from cleaning it over and over again up to putting it into the dishwasher. Since all of it didn't show the result I longed for I tried to carefully remove the keys to see whether there is something under them or not. It didn't work :(.
Thus I ended up in ripping the last keys out to turn them into pin-board pins. I guess I'll go and buy myself a new keyboard during the week.
What happened apart from that?
The new grass turns out great. Rolf even had to cut it :).
We went to the hot-pot again to relax and to forget about all the tasks that are open to do. I corrected half of my classes final exams and the students are way better than the last ones I had. The upcoming week will be easier then the past ones, only the weather is remarkably wet these days.
So take care of your keyboards, love them, hug them, clean them, and just in case they don't appreciate your fellowship have a glue gun close by ;)

Greetings Me.

Frugal Living - Budgetin Strategies

Budgeting always sounds a bit odd, like it's only done to bug someone, or like companies doing it in times of tension. Shifting the point of view budgeting is vital for everyone. First you need to know what you earn, so that you can truly enjoy spending that what's remaining ;).
The basic steps are easy:

1. know your income (list everything that brings in money e.g. salary, aid money from the government (Kindergeld, Harz 4), pension, income from shares and bonds, etc.)
2. check what has to be paid regularly (rent, car, food, etc.)
3. calculate a rate of money to be saved for urgencies, holidays, that ugly final car holdback, annual payments etc. Make sure to put that money far away because although it's not used now you need to spend it sooner or later. I consider it as spend and put it on a short term saving bank account. By doing so I don't have to take care of an imaginary line on my usual bank account but I know people who are doing so.
4. take off point two and three from point one and you have the amount of money you can spend freely

If you get a negative number you are in trouble because that means that you are spending more than you earn each month. If you don't want to end up being filmed by RTL for their reality show "Raus aus den Schulden" ("Get out of the debt") you need to check point two and three more carefully.

Maybe you can cut back on hobbies,  your car, clothing or luxury goods.

I'll keep this one short because there are well written websites and tools that help you get in contact with the principles of budgeting:

1. About.com Frugal Budgeting a description on how to set up and maintain a budget
2. WikiHow How to Budget a description including an example
3. Better Budgeting free budget forms for the ones who want to do it on paper
4. Dough Roller 75 Painless Money Saving Tips a more or less serious list of tips
5. Dough Roller 10 Online Budgeting Tools  here you find  a list of budgeting tools, some are free others aren't. Thus take care that you don't invest in something you don't need. I used to use a budgeting system but I could never convince myself that my data is save in such a system. As a result I played with the system and found it helpful but I never entered my real financial data and kept it running. If you consider to use a program be careful because financial data is nothing to be light-hearted about.

You can find tons of articles about budgeting just use google ;). You don't need to track every little amount you spend unless you have financial difficulties at the moment or you are planning to buy something really expensive. The whole budgeting issue should not be pure pain, it should open a way to see your situation from another perspective. If you track all the money you spent in a month you will be surprised which areas cost the most.