I bought two tickets to see Wicked in NYC on March 21, but then I got invited to a wedding on that day. Sucks, huh? I paid a total of $279.65 for the tickets (with fees and taxes). I just sold them on TicketLiquidator for $320. TicketLiquidator takes a 10% cut of the sale, so that leaves me with $288, so I made a profit of $8.35. Hahahaha.....not much of a profit, but I'm glad that I was able to get rid of them without losing any money!!

I just started a new class and one of the best things about it is that the professor isn't requiring a textbook. So, I'm going to sell my textbook from the last class and hopefully make a little money off of it because it's in great shape. It's amazing how expensive textbooks are. Ridiculous.

I got a brochure in the mail yesterday from Verizon offering $30 off of a new phone. Of course I get this 3 days after I buy a new phone. Jeez.

The offer was for $30 off a phone or 100 bonus minutes. I have a 450 minute plan and never even use more than 200, so the bonus minutes are kind of worthless.

Oh well....

For some reason, when I connected my Blackberry Storm to my laptop, my laptop did not like it at all. It froze up, wouldn't boot sometimes, and when it would, the wireless card wouldn't work. I did some troubleshooting and tried uninstalling the card and then reinstalling it and trying to update the drivers, but nothing worked. And then I was prompted to do a Windows update. I hadn't done one in a long time, so I went through all that. In the end, it said the update couldn't be completed and it would be backed out. That's fine, right? Well at the end of backing all that out, it said that everything couldn't be replaced and Windows XP may not operate correctly.

Ugh.

So, I knew that when I rebooted that it probably wasn't going to work. I wasn't planning on rebooting, but I was focused on homework and when I was prompted to reboot, I clicked OK without even thinking. Now it's dead. It turns on, but nothing boots. It did once and said that there was a fatal hardware failure and the system is halted.

Since I take classes online and I have a meeting tomorrow night and an exam on Saturday to study for, I just bought a new laptop at BestBuy. It's a Dell Inspiron and cost me $750 total. Sh!t. I didn't see this coming. I've got the money, but I like to plan for large purchases like that.

On the other hand, I can't really complain because I've been using corporate laptops for 8 years. I haven't had to buy one of my own because it's always been provided by work and they don't really care what I do on it. So, I guess it was just time to have one of my own?

I only went to the gym 3 times in February!! That's $21.65 a visit. I have to do better that. My goal is to go at least 10 times in March. I think I can do that. It's just so hard with work and school. So frustrating!

I bought a Blackberry Storm yesterday. Not so frugal, huh? My old phone was just a Razr and I wanted something more modern. It cost me $157.49 with tax. I guess it could be worse.

It's going to take some time to get used to, but I like it so far. I'm going to see how it goes. I can return it within 30 days if I en up not liking it.

I also had to add a data plan to my account, so my monthly bill will be about $30 more. I'm not liking that part very much...

My friend asked me an interesting question today: should I stop contributing to my 401K and pay off my car?

That kind of boggled my mind, but she figures that if she's probably going to lose a large portion of the money if she puts it in her 401K, then she might as well pay off her car loan. Hmmmm...not a bad thought. But she'd also give up her company matching contribution to her 401K. I told her that that alone would mean that she's leaving some money on the table. And currently, she's only putting 4% into her 401K, so she isn't at the maximum match that he company will contribute.

She's going to stick with the 401K. I think that's a good choice.

Does anyone have a different opinion?