I drive a 1994 Chevy Lumina. It has 143,000 miles. Nearly all the miles I put on the car are back and forth to work - about 30 miles per day. The car has always been fairly reliable. But its days are certainly numbered.

I got a call out of the blue from my aunt yesterday. It seems that the Mazda that their son drives had a transmission blow out. This is the car that my aunt and uncle drove about 10-15 years ago. Their son has been driving it for about 5 years or so. Anyway, my aunt made the following proposal to me: They would put anew transmission in it, and simply give it to me. WOW! She also suggested that I take the Lumina off insurance and park it, as she cannot guarantee the reliability of the Mazda.

My uncle is meticulous about car care, and I know that this car has been well cared for. I don't feel as if I need the charity, but the deal is too good to turn down.

This is an interesting time for me financially. We were able to pay down quite a bit of debt with our tax refund. Now that we have our CC debt somewhat tamed, I've been using more of my mental energy on our mortgage debt, unsold house, etc.

I'm guessing most of you watched M*A*S*H. When the choppers came in with wounded soldiers, Hawkeye and Margaret would triage the patients. They took the terribly worst off ones first, and the really bad ones second. That's what my finances feel like. I concentrated on the high interest credit card debt first because it was killing us, and left the really bad mortgage debt for later. I feel as if it's later now, and we need to start addressing the mortgage debt, even ahead of the CC debt now.

I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but we have renters living in our house #1 now. They are interested in buying the house, so we agreed to rent to them for one year, take the houde off the market, and revisit in July.

Wheter or not they are the purchasers, we have to unload that house this summer.

So, I'm going to start hoarding cash ahead of paying off CC debt, so we can be in a better position to close on the house when the time comes. I'll still pay more than minimum payments, but not as much as the past 16 months.

I hope this is the right decision. If not, I'm sure someone will let me know.

I disposed of my roof waste last Friday. To start the story at the beginning, we called around for dumpster rental quotes, and found out that the minimum that we would have to pay was $250. That was more than we wanted to spend, so we decided to borrow my dad's trailer, and we had the roofers pile the waste onto it.

I hauled the trailer to the land fill, about 12 miles away, and the disposal fee was $19. I made two trips to the salvage yard, about 4 miles away. One trip was the scrap steel, and the second trp was the scrap aluminum. The steel brought $32, and the aluminum brought $20. Probably twenty percent plus or so of the scrap steel was other scrap we had laying around, so we'll say that the scrap steel from the roof was worth $25.

So: Cost for trash disposal - $19
Proceeds from steel - $25
Proceeds from aluminum - $20
Cost for travel (40 miles @ $.50 per mile) - $20

Net for waste disposal - $6.

Sure beats $250 for dumpster rental.

But, if we had rented the dumpster, there is some other trash laying around the place that we would have disposed of. I guess I need to make another $19 trip to the landfill!

I get paid once a month, on the last day of the month. So, today is pay day! Indeed, my favorite day of the month. The direct deposit happens at 12:00 midnight, so I wake up on the morning of the last day of the month with a nice surprise in my checking account.

I've blogged before about how we've been saving for a roof. The strategy I've taken for roof savings is to take whatever is left at the end of the month, and transfer that into our savings account. Just moments ago, I transferred $429.84 into savings. We now have $4,620.26 in our roof savings account. "Just" $2,879.74 left to go.

We have a black walnut tree behind our house. It drops walnuts on our house, and they tend to be very loud. Also, the tree has grown enough that the branches are now scraping against the roof, and that is annoying. My wife has let me know that it is time to take action.

So, I borrowed my dad's chain saw yesterday, and brought it home. With chain saw in hand I looked at the tree, and I looked at the house. I looked at the tree, and then the house again, and quiclky came to the realization that the likelihood that I would damage the house if i cut even a branch off the tree was probably 80%.

It would probably cost at least $300 to hire a professional tree company to take care of the problem. So I opted for an interim solution - hire the Amish guy who lives down the road. Yes, I have an amish guy that lives down the road. Actually there are three Amish families that live within a mile of my house. This particular Amish guy cuts down trees, and cuts lumber for a living.

The problem is ... he will most likely refuse payment. Which would be fine if I had an in-kind service to return to him. Amish tend to be fairly self sufficient. I'll try to offer him $75 or something like that, but if (when) he refuses, I'll be indebted to him. I'll try to come up with something in return, but I don't know what it will be.

I keep looking at my retiremt fund balance. Once per day. As you know, it's like looking at a yo-yo, that doesn't seem to return back to the hand each time it's dropped.

I know that there are crazy weird things happening right now, and today's balance will have little in common with the balance 6 months or 6 years from now. But, it's kind of interesting to see what I hear on the news translated directly into my own retirement fund.

After yesterday's post, I found myself fixated with my debt to retirement fund calculation. I ran a projection. I assumed my monthly contributions to my retirement fund plus modest gains (thanks again, congress) plus my projected decrease in CC debt.

I project that by March 2012, my ratio should be 14.6%. Of the three factors I mentioned, (contributions, fund growth and CC reduction), I have control over two of them. My contributions are pretty much fixed at 15% of salary. I could increase contributions, but I probably will not. I have absolutely no control over the market. The one factor I can really work on is CC reduction.

Let's see if I can continue to whittle down on CC debt, and meet my short-range goal of a 14.6% CC debt to retirement fund ratio.

This isn't a real financial benchmark ratio, as far as I know. But, 5 years ago, it was about 100%. In other words, I owed about as much on credit cards as I had saved toward my retirement - $30,000.

I calculated this ratio again, and it is now 20%, even with the pathetic performance of my retirement fund over the past several weeks (thanks, congress). Or, for every dollar I have saved towards retirement, I owe twenty cents in credit card debt.

Of course, my goal is to have that ratio down to zero.

Maybe some of you read my question in the forums yesterday. I'm starting an EF. We've gone almost three years without using credit cards. And, we've managed to operate without an EF. But, it's time to change that. So...We'll establish a $1,000 EF, and begin beefing it up when the cards are paid off.

We actually have some money saved up right now - $4,200. That's new roof savings. We figure the new roof at $7,500. Plus, we need to have $800 in reserve to pay back the security deposit to our renters if/when they move out. So, the savings goal will need to be $9,300 before we can buy the new roof - "just" $5,100 to go!

As I mentioned in my previous blog, we have renters moving in this weekend. That will help the cash flow quite a bit. I also mentioend way back in April on this blog that we need a new roof.

A couple of things have happened since then. First, the estimate for the roof was about $1,500 more than we expected, and our other renters moved out. The money we had saved for the roof had to cover the shortfall created by the lack of rent plus the return of the security deposit.

If we start saving our rental income, I figure that we might have enough money saved up by October for the roof.

After we have the money saved up, I'd also like to establish a $1,000 EF, plus we have to keep $800 in reserve for the renters if and when they need their security deposit back.

On the bright side, we have been cash flowing each month since last October.