Free Advanced Screening: Weeds & The Big C

Filed under: All, Entertainment, Free, Out on the Town

I know, I know, it’s been forever since I’ve posted any free screenings. It’s not from laziness, just a lack of decent screenings available across the country. It seems most studios are doing their screenings for through Gofobo and those screening passes are usually gone by the time I find out about them.

But, good old Entertainment Weekly hasn’t changed their ways!

This isn’t a movie screening, but instead an advanced screening for the Season 6 premiere of Weeds and the series premiere of The Big C. I’ll include trailers for each show below. I’m pretty excited about this because the boyfriend and I are huge Weeds fans and are also interested in The Big C.

Since this is an Entertainment Weekly Screening, you have to sign up and if you’re selected you’ll receive an email which is your pass (I’ve always received a pass from them).

The screenings are on Wednesday, August 11th. These are the cities available:

Atlanta
Baltimore
Berkeley
Cambridge
Chicago
Dallas
Greenwood Village
Bloomfield
Houston
Indianapolis
Los Angeles
Milwaukee
Minneapolis
New York
Philadelphia
San Diego
San Francisco
Seattle
Frontenac
Washington

This is an Entertainment Weekly screening, so it should be reasonably easy to get tickets for it, but these screenings are always WAY overbooked. You should probably plan on being there about 2 hours early, but since these are TV shows and not movies, it may not be as popular. Use your own disgresion.

If you’re new to advanced movie screenings, check out my tips.

Here’s the trailer for season 6 of Weeds:

Here’s the trailer for The Big C:

Edit: Watch the first episode of The Big C streaming free online.

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Posted at 5:52 PM, July 29, 2010 by Tiffany

Paying a Little Extra on Student Loans Really Adds Up

Filed under: All, Debt Elimination, Finances, Money Saving Tips

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I haven’t written too much about my personal finances on this blog in the past year, and that’s mostly because I’ve spent the majority of the year unemployed, so it’s been very tough.

One of the biggest strains on my finances is the immense amount of student loan debt I amassed before I graduated from college in 2008. I had no idea when I took out the loans to pay for school exactly how much a financial burden it would be, especially since everyone kept saying, “Oh, just take out the loans and then with your degree you’ll get a good job and pay them off.”

Obviously, that has not been the case. The economy sucks, unemployment is high, and I haven’t had a decent paying job since graduation. I spent most of the time since graduation putting my loans in forbearance, so I didn’t have to make payments but the interest kept piling up and adding on to my principal. It was a snowball effect.

By the time I was able to start making payments on my loans in January of this year (thanks to a temporary job), my monthly payment was $1024.43 for my private loans. That’s a lot. In fact it was just a little bit less than I was making each month after taxes. Luckily I don’t have expense many people have like rent or a car, but it’s tough to make those payments every month (even more so now that I’m not working).

In March, I wrote about ways to help pay off your student loans, and the first tip I mentioned was paying a little extra each month.

I know it may not seem like it makes a difference, especially if you’re only paying a couple extra dollars a month, but it does. With Sallie Mae (and probably other lenders as well) anything extra you pay each month is applied to your principal balance (as long as any interest or fees were already paid). Those couple dollars each month are shaving off of the amount you’re charged interest on, which decreases the amount of interest you pay each month. That in turn means more of the money you pay each month ends up going towards your principal and so on.

But how does a couple of dollars make a difference? Well, I’ll show you, with evidence from my e-bills.

As I said before, my monthly payment was $1024.43 a month when I started making payments in January.

Instead of paying that exact amount I rounded up and paid $1030 a month. That extra $5.57 a month doesn’t seem like a lot, but it made a difference.

In April my bill came and I noticed Sallie Mae lowered my monthly payment to $1021.63. That’s $2.80 a month less.

You may think, “Oh, 2.80 a month isn’t much.” Well, I have 176 months of payment left, so multiply that by $2.80 and that’s $492.80 I saved.

This is when my job ended, so I lowered the amount I was paying to $1025 a month. That’s only $3.37 extra a month, but it’s something. For last month, I tacked on an extra $10 and paid $1035.

My new bill came yesterday and my new payment is $1021.59 a month.

That’s only a 4 cent adjustment, which isn’t too exciting, but over the next 172 months it will save me $6.88.

So far I’ve saved myself $499.68. That’s a significant chunk of change, and this is only after 7 payments with a little extra. Think of how much more this will snowball when I can pay a little more extra and really start reducing my principal.

My recommendation is that if you’re using this technique and Sallie Mae starts lowering your monthly payments, keep paying the same amount you started out with. You already know how to live on a budget where you’re paying that amount to your student loans, so keep doing it. It will help you pay it down even faster and lower the amount of interest you are paying.

This technique could also be used to pay down other loans or credit card debt.

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Posted at 9:07 AM, July 28, 2010 by Tiffany

Patio Gardening 2010: Week 15 – Waiting for Tomatoes

Filed under: All, Food, Home, Patio Gardening

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I’m sorry that I’m a day late on this post. We had a couple different things come up this weekend that were unexpected, and we haven’t even gotten around to filming this week’s video yet. The plan is to film that tonight, so I will post it when it’s online.

Not too exciting this week plant-wise. We’ve had some super hot weather and then some crazy thunderstorms on Friday and Saturday. Powdery mildew is still running rampant and I’m worried it may claim a casualty this week.

It was pretty windy for a couple days so the cucumbers and tomatoes kept getting blown over. The cherry tomato plants have been getting so tall that they’ve outgrown their bamboo stakes, so I rigged up a little set-up with rope and string to keep them growing upwards and keep them from whipping around in the wind so much that they topple over.

Now if only those darn tomatoes would ripen.

We harvested another cucumber this week and hopefully can do 2 more this week. Maybe some beans as well.

Whenever we can, we use the basil, green onions, and lettuce. We’re so pleased with how well the lettuce is doing that next year we’ll probably grow more lettuce type plants. There’s something really fulfilling about going out to our garden and picking our own food. I also like the money it’s saving us.

The squash and zucchini plants are huge and the pumpkin is still spreading it’s vines. No female flowers yet on any of them. I’m getting impatient!

~~I’ll edit this post with the video as soon as it’s filmed and up.~~ Here’s the video:

For those who are new, this year the boyfriend and I are doing a little container gardening experiment where we are trying to grow various herbs and vegetables on our patio. We live in the city of Chicago, so traditional gardening is out of the question. You can subscribe to the RSS feed to instantly receive the posts each week and also check out our previous posts. Feel free to subscribe to our Youtube channel as well.

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Posted at 11:17 AM, July 27, 2010 by Tiffany

Freebies, Samples, & Mp3 Round-Up 7-22-10

Filed under: All, Free, Samples

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I know it’s not Friday, but I felt like doing the freebie post today. It just seems like a good day for freebies, ya know?

Here we go…

Freebies & Samples

Free Mp3 Downloads

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Posted at 1:30 PM, July 22, 2010 by Tiffany

Patio Gardening 2010: Week 14 – Blossom End Rot

Filed under: All, Food, Home, Patio Gardening

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Overall it hasn’t been too exciting this week. The weather has been been hot and I’m not sure if the plants are liking it too much. I try to keep them well watered, doing it in the morning and at night. No fatalities yet!

I did think I was going to lose my mind this week dealing with the cutworms. Every time I went out to water, I’d find 4 or 5 of them, and just when I though I found them all, there were more. I also went out at night, when they’re actively eating, and and plucked them off the plants.

Now I think we’re finally rid of them. I haven’t seen any for several days and I hope that’s the last of this mess.

We have 3 cucumbers that look like they’ll be ready for harvest this week or next, so that’s very exciting.

The tomato plants are still producing flowers and tomatoes are forming. They’re all still green and we anxiously await their ripening. On one plant we noticed 3 of the tomatoes weren’t looking right.

The bottoms were dark brown and bizarre looking. I did a little Googling and it looks like blossom end rot. One good thing is that this is a condition and not a disease, so it won’t spread to the other tomatoes. It seems to be caused by a calcium deficiency and only effecting one plant, so we’ll keep our eye on it.

We harvested 4 more beans this week. I’ve seen less flowers, so I wonder if the beans will just be producing less and less as the summer goes on. I believe the seed packets said to stagger planting for a continual harvest, so it looks like we may just be done for the summer.

Other than that, we’ve started to enjoy the green onions this week with our meals. They’re pretty thin still, but they are packed with flavor. Also, our Basil has started to flower, so we cut the tops off to prevent flowering and make sure it will keep producing leaves.

The zuchinni and yellow squash have started to flower again, but no female flowers yet. The pumpkin is still growing, though some of the leaves are yellowing and have powdery mildew (grumble grumble). One of the vines is about 3-4 feet long and we have to be careful not to step on it. I’d really love to get a pumpkin out of this, but there’s not female flowers yet.

Overall our patio garden has gotten pretty huge and seems to be taking over the balcony. It kind of sucks since we can’t really use the balcony for anything else, but it’s really awesome to go out there and smell all the different plants.

Here’s this week’s video: