Grocery store deal joy - fresh pineapple for .67/lb, dried spaghetti/fettucine/linguine for .50/lb, mixed nuts for $1.79/lb. All beat what I'd seen in North Seattle in two years, based on my price book. I've stocked up, but now what I have do is eat what I have and stop buying!!!

I found a tax estimator:

http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor/calcs/n_tax/main.asp

Not that its perfect, but it should be able to tell me if I owe or am going to get a refund. With the IRA it looks like this year I will get a refund - first time in about 5 yrs. I aim with my withholding to owe a little, about $100. The estimator is giving me a refund of about $450. It gives me a little impetus to get all my forms together.

Well, my bank didn't listen to my begging. They aren't going to waive the fee. Fine - I've got to suck it up and learn from it. Its easy to be snarky - I made a whole $8.65 in interest in 2005 from that little savings account. I made $163.45 interest on my ING account.

Cleaned out the freezer of the bags of bones and frozen vegetables and made a big batch of turkey vegetable soup. Yummy and cleansing at the same time. Collected my two coupons for the grocery store for next Saturday.

Wished my uncle a happy new year and gave him a vague explanation of what is going down with the farm. Sister called and asked when we get distributions. Depends on how done the "done deal" was for the first piece of property - it brought in exactly 300K. In the farmhouse, most of the furniture is out, along with the stained glass and some of the carved moldings. The only pieces of furniture left are those that the rest of the family is going to take in a couple of weeks. Sister told me a little about the possible buyer - a county employee. Hopefully this will be a second house - the farmhouse is barely livable. The last two barn kittens were having a run on the second floor of her house in Milwaukee.

I collected up all the tax papers for the February to come.

Got another piece of tax-vital paper today from one of my DRPs. Looked at a lot of pledges today, and I finished by actually going to the gym *By Myself* for a little cardio bike pedaling. I lasted at least 1 minute more than Friday.

Got a card from the paper deliverer this morning, or rather, I got a card with a self addressed, stamped envelope. Tip troll, if you ask me. I never know how to respond to these things, especially since he has an unerring ability to never, ever hit the driveway. I'm thinking of writing "5$ now if you hit the driveway, another 5$ if you keep it up". But then the turnover will kill ya. I'd have to train each person as they screw up.

Thank you retire@50!

Took a look at the official IRS publication for IRAs

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p590.pdf. I made under $40,000 this year, including dividends and interest which right now isn't that much. I'm at the high end (it appears that $45,000 is the cutoff), but the traditional IRA is what I'm looking for. Since I can do it - I'm going to the limit at $4,000.

I asked Vanguard to mail me some info. I have a little time and I want to pull it from my ING account, which is going to the de facto antechamber for the family gifts and the inheritance. It'll be the first project that my inheritance money is going to. I decided that the big lump of money will go to Vanguard unless they mishandle the little IRA, so it will be a test for them too.

Speaking of ING, I figured out how to make a sub account so now I have the family gifts and the kiss my a** fund separated. Its important to me - otherwise its the family kiss my a** gift fund. That was 10 years ago. Thanks to mymoneyblog, I found out what the routing number of ING is. I'm not really interested in pulling 4000$ back into my checking account.

Not much today, thankfully. Trips to a couple of grocery stores to pick up milk, 8-grain hot cereal, brown rice, and bubble bath. I could have gotten away with going to one grocery but the holiday food samples were fantastic at the other, so I had a frugal lunch of samples.

Found the equation that tells me how to best invest in my DRPs - put it in my spreadsheet. When I want to deploy my lump sum into my DRPs I can figure it out.

But I should explore starting an IRA, to save money on my taxes. I've either done the 403B or been too poor for an IRA other years, not to mention that I thought that if you have one you can't do the other. I have too much dividend earnings, I think, to file 1040EZ this year while next year when dad's estate lands in my lap my taxes will be even higher. No matter where I invest 250K the interest, dividends, and capital gains is going to be high. (4% of 250K = 10K, and 33% of that would be 3.3K). Balancing that out every year with a 5K IRA contribution is only prudent. Roth or classic?

Folks on the west coast could start getting their free credit reports from the three credit bureaus on Dec. 1. Based on thinking about buying a house (I didn't - too expensive for the value you get), I had my report pulled over a year ago. Looking at them all three were riddled with minor mistakes, so setting them straight was a good little project.

Since my score was good, I wanted to monitor and protect my report, so I pulled a different bureau's report every four months. That way, if I lost my credit card or had my identity stolen I could pick it up in four months instead of years. I looked at Equifax's and fixed the employment history in Dec., Trans Union's had a nine year old tax lien that should have fallen off and I fixed that on Mar. I looked at Experian's last night. All clear!

That was so nice - it wasn't always the case. About ten years ago I was in sad financial shape - unemployed and took unemployment compensation. I got caught because no taxes were taken out. I paid the IRS, but not the AZ state income tax, which promptly slapped a tax lien on me even when I moved to NC. A year later I paid it off, and the fact that I paid it also went on my report. Did I get brownie points for that? Nope. If anything, the record that I paid for it reminded everybody that had this in the first place. Grrr.