Where you gonna sleep tonight?
And you’re singing the songs
Thinking this is the life
And you wake up in the morning and your head feels twice the size
Well, out of all the various options there are to change my life but not so much that it’d be completely different I seem to have settled on one. Move closer to where I work and get a car. Last Thursday while working - and honestly not thinking about my life plans - it suddenly came to me who I could move in with. I have a very good friend who I’d love to live together but if she’s going to move it will be in the directly opposite direction of where I want to go. But: my brother is living in a relatively large appartment with 2 bedrooms in addition to a large kitchen, a living room and small storage room. And when he has his friends visiting - which to my knowledge he often has - I don’t think the apartment would feel too confined. I’m pretty sure I’d be able to be on my own if I wanted to. We’re meeting next Sunday to talk about details and what not and until then we’ve said we wouldn’t tell anybody. However, I’m getting more and more excited about this so I feel I have to blog about it.
It’d allow me to save quite a significant amount of money on rent (even though I already live cheap), pay only half for electrics, internet & telephone (probably) and apparently health insurance and tax would be a bit lower too. There are also other costs which get greatly reduced by not living alone - such as food. And - given that I’ll have a car - I’ll save at least an hour every day (!) on commuting time. I think the time it currently takes me each day to get to work and home again is what’s bothering me the most. However, part of my activities would still be centered close to where I’m living now - and of course a lot of my friends would remain there. But I could still quickly drop by at my parent’s or one of my friends’ place to avoid travelling back and forth too often. And of course I’d be living a lot closer to my sister - whom I currently would love to see more often very much.
Buying a car - and of course paying for gas, insurance and tax - will however use up pretty much all my current savings. And I actually want to save money for a big overseas holiday next year. So, as of today I have to stop my one (huge) indulgence: buy DVDs and magazines and clippings off Ebay & Amazon. It’s not something I’ve ever really been able to afford - but I figured whatever I didn’t spend on clothes etc - I’m so not a fashion person - I could spend on that. While I’ve always been able to pay all the bills etc I am now left with somewhat scarce savings. It will be very hard to break the habit of completing my clippings collections. It’s something I’ve been doing ever since I got my own credit card - which was in Spring 2002. So I thought a fair compromise would be to only buy magazines that are available at my local newsstand - theoretically I could still spend a fairly large amount of money that way but I’m probably bound to miss out on a lot of features because I’d only learn of them once the new issues are up. And compared to the prices on ebay (it’s mostly the shipping costs which are making it all so expensive) it’ll still be a lot cheaper. Oh, I’m so going to miss getting stuff from Japan, Australia and Spain - and getting one-day publications from the UK, the US, France… In any case I’m determined to save a lot of money!!! I just have to be careful to not give money my every thought or talk about it constantly. That’s not the kind of person I want to turn into!