I have a few minutes so I thought I’d share a bit of progress I’ve made the past couple of days.

I’ve decided I don’t like the term “drop-out.” I don’t feel like I’m dropping out of anything. For the time being I’m going with “extrication” because it has connotations of disentangling myself from wreckage.

Time: Need To Pass Along A Couple Clients

I’m unloading a couple of my web design clients that are causing me too much stress. They’re not bad clients, I’m just overextended and tired of being afraid of my business in-box. So if you’re a good web designer with lots of WP, LAMP, CSS, H5 & a little jQuery/AJAX under your belt, send me a note — paula at mythodrome dot net — and possibly I can pass you a couple hundred bux of work per month. Or if you know someone, let me know that too. I need to find a replacement designer quick.

Money

Without these clients, it looks like with some juggling I’ll be able to get my expenses down to about 1/3 my remaining income. I feel pretty stupid for not doing this math sooner but oh well — everybody has to start somewhere right? Anyway, so today I cancelled my cable TV. I also went to a really cool butcher shop down on California and set up a deal to get scrap meat for Zeke. Each Monday I’ll pick up 15 lbs of scrap meat for about $12 – $15.

(Sidebar: If you have dogs, you can save a ton of money and feed your fuzzy kids way better nutrition by switching them to a raw meat diet. Here’s the Wikipedia page about it. I feed Zeke the prey model, or as close to it as I can get.)

I’m also in the process of quitting smoking. It’s shocking and nauseating how much money I’ve been wasting on cigarettes. I have about 4 weeks to go in the quitting process, and after that I’ll have another significant (cignificant?) chunk of change to squirrel away. My big hurdle is going to be Verizon. I’m locked into a two-year data contract which I need to break, but it costs a few hundred dollars to do that. So I’m still looking into my options there.

My first immediate goal is to collect $1000 to sit on for when I get booted out of my squat. I have to set up a proper cash flow spreadsheet so I can see when exactly I will accomplish that, but I’m going to shoot for three months. I’ll be damn proud of myself if I can save $1000 in three months, on <$12,000 per year.