The holiday times are expensive. Traveling, gifts, birthdays, special occasions etc… Before every holiday season I try to build up my spending account to at least a few hundred dollars, but this time I am trying something different.
I have opened up a 2nd spending account for big expenses such as Christmas gifts, big purchases and vacations. I will set an automatic, weekly transfer of money into this account like I do with all my other ancillary accounts.
I hate the idea of allocating more money towards spending during the holiday season, so I will start preparing now.
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I decided to go uber-cheap school shopping after an Entrepreneur Society meeting. Basically whenever I need to stock up on pens, pencils or notebooks, I simply go into some of the very large auditorium classrooms around campus and pick up the good pencils and pens that people leave behind. I walked through two adjacent auditoriums at about 9:00pm before they were cleaned, and picked up the following supplies:
Why buy when it’s free?
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The Dalai Lama speech was this past Tuesday. I wanted to take a picture with the Dalai Lama, but it didn’t quite happen. I had some appointments with professors right before the speech at 4:00pm, so I didn’t have the proper preparation time required. My attempt to gain press access was also not granted (and it turns out would have been useless). The speech filled the whole Erwin Events Center:
The security was not nearly tight as they claimed it would be, so I didn’t have many problems snapping a few pictures.
The speech wasn’t anything amazing, but he did have a sense of humor. Here is a funny picture of the Dalai Lama wearing his red visor to better see the audience!
I didn’t get a picture with him, so Operation Lama failed. Oh well.
Just as in business: You win some, you lose some.