Vacation, Flea Market, Auto Insurance

Today is September 11th. How life can be affected by the events of one day in our lifetime.

Vacation
My wife and I will leave for a week's vacation this week. We've estimated that the trip will cost up to $3,000. It is a combination business (she is speaking at a conference) and pleasure (we will visit some friends afterwards) trip. After working so hard to save and earn more money, it's a bit tough to switch gears. Some of the expenses will be deductible through my wife's business, but it's still a large outlay. Often when we travel we stay with friends or family instead of hotels, which even at discounted rates will still cost us about $100 / night during this trip. But vacations are important; it's also nice to live a bit differently sometimes.

Flea Market
For the first time, we spent time at a flea market this weekend and specifically looked for items that we might be able to resell on eBay. My wife found an old slide viewer in its original box. We bought it for $3; from completed sales on eBay, it looks like we may be able to sell it for as much as $100. I also bought some very old books, but I'm not as sure that they will command a high price. I haven't put many items up for auction yet, but I am accumulating items at home. It seems that we will need to put up a large volume regularly while we learn which items are 'sellable' and which items are not.

Auto Insurance
Finally yielding to Geico's unyielding commercials, we did an online auto insurance quote and found that we could save about $100 on our six month policy. We're down to one car now, having recently decided that our light usage didn't justify immediately purchasing a second vehicle after my wife's car died last month. We're unfortunately paying a surcharge due to one accident last year, but that would be the case with any company we used. Every little bit counts in trying to balance our budget.

et Al
One obstacle on the way to financial freedom: I couldn't figure out why eBay constantly asked for my password as I moved from screen to screen. Finally realized that my firewall product wasn't allowing cookies to be saved. How easy it would have been to use this as an excuse for not maintaining my efforts to develop this revenue stream!