Stop Milking Me! - Cow’s Journey To Financial Freedom

I shamelessly admit that I am a Starbucks addict. A year and half ago, I spent $160 a month on their drinks. Now, after numerous rehabs, “Jamba Juice treatments” and budgeting, I am down to $40 - $60 a months. It is still not pretty. So I was determined to find a way to further reduce the cost. Finally, I have found a way to drink Starbucks for free!

The answer? The Starbucks’ Bearista!!

If you have a year 2000 Asia version of Dragon Bearista, you are sitting on gold. Check out the following eBay bid. The $12.95 9 inch tall bear is sold for $580! Yep, you are sitting on gold if you have a few of those.

Well, I am not that lucky. Plus, I only have to come up with about 50 bucks a month. Luckily, the Starbucks bearistas have become hot collectable items on eBay. There are some crazy bearista lovers who would spend 50 bucks on a single bear to complete their collections. I started buying and selling bears on eBay a couple of weeks ago. The profit I made in two days is enough to cover two months worth of White Mocha.

I know I won’t reach financial freedom by buying and selling the little teddy bears, but I can probably fatten up my Starbucks fund so I may not need to pay for Starbucks again – at least that’s what I am hoping for.

I met a guy who self claims as a “Cardboard Holder” working in downtown Denver last year when I was pretty active participating the events organized by Denver’s meetin.org, a website allows people to make friends through small group events,. If you have never been to Denver, let me tell ya, we have lots and lots of “Cardboard Holders” on almost every major intersection in the center part of the city. Kyle (alias used), a cardboard holder is also an enthusiastic rock climber like me. I spent about 300 bucks on my top roper equipment. He is an expert lead climber so he’s probably got more gear than I do. This past winter, I saw him a couple of times at the ski resort in the High Country too. Our Five-Mountain ski pass isn’t exactly cheap. It’s a one time fee of $369! Well, I guess Kyle’s downtown cardboard holding business must be pretty lucrative so he can afford his active outdoorsy lifestyle. According to the rumors, if you are good at “people skills”, you can bring in about 20 bucks an hour. It’s definitely a hard work considering the bitter winter weather. I think these so called “bums” still beat those people who are sitting at home all day long and collect food stamps.

So if you ever want to give it a try, here is a pretty good guide about “How To Ask For Money On The Street” on wikiHow, a cardboard is highly recommended:

STEPS:

1. What you may read will be brash, and at times distasteful to the average bum. Hence, although blasphemous, you must realize that you are the vagabond of every city in the world, with the exception of maybe Washington D.C., where you may be praised as a Lobbyist.
2. Any sound plan begins with an initial investment of effort. Before we begin, make an effort to not reek of urine and make an effort to not alarm people with your depraved and desperate appearance/behavior

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We all have the concept to save for an emergency fund to cover the unexpected events. Well, I certainly didn’t expect my emergency fund could be used to cover.. umm… my bra emergency.

Lately, my usual elegant comfy Victoria Secret bars that I have been wearing for a while are irritating the heck out of me. They even caused quite a bit of bruises on me. So to fix the problem, I went to a nearby VS store’s wardrobe room to seek for professionals’ help. Turns out, I have naturally gained a cup size so all of my other VS bras don’t fit anymore… Ok, I guess that’s a good problem for a girl…

But after I came home and laid all of my beautiful VS bras on the bed and did a calculation, I wasn’t too happy with what I saw. Since I buy the top line designs, each piece costs me about $45. To replace my entire collection, I am looking at a whooping $720 budget! Although it is not as severe as Carrie’s shoe problems (if you remember Carrie from Sex And The City when she found out she spent $30,000 on shoes over the years), it’s still a steep price tag for me since I am saving every penny to try to buy a home this year…

But the thought of downgrading from Victory Secret Very Sexy Collection to WalMart Granny Collection is just not too appealing to me.

Well, maybe I will just have to make the Cow site to work harder and pull in some Ads dollars and expand my sales on eBay. So my next month’s Free The Cow’s Project goal is to milk enough money to make my boobs happy… Ok, that just didn’t come out right.. but.. you know what I mean…

I recently tried www.myspendingplan.com online to figure out where my money all went. Gosh! It took me about 3 hours to set it up, not to mention keeping it up in the future. So I finally gave up, pulled out an Excel Spreadsheet and did the same thing in about 30 minutes.

I even used pencil and paper before to figure out my monthly budget. It’s quick and convenient, but without a trace since I don’t have a habit to stack up random scratch paper.

At one point when I had tons of credit card debts, I used Notepad to list all of my credit card rates and my balances. I even set up a debt consolidation plan in the same text file. Believe it or not, I still use it to keep up with what’s going on.

Although I only spent about 2 hours on Microsoft Money due to its complexity, I heard enough complains about the tool and how hard to balance the books.

It almost occurs to me that the more complex the tool is, the less useful it is. How do you feel about this?

Matter of fact, MyMoneyBlog did a nice little survey and you can read about the results here. It seems that most people use Excel spreadsheets and a large chunk also use the fancy software like MS Money and Quicken.

For now, I think I am very happy to figure out the pluses and minuses using my spreadsheets, text files, paper and pencil.