Amen to that! I’ve gotten in the habit of pacing around wearing a headset if I’m on a non-Netmeeting conference call. I’m purposely going out and running errands during my lunch break, too, for the sake of A. moving around and B. getting out of the house. Telecommuting is a blessing AND a curse.

Re: #3

I’d like to apologize in advance for sounding a bit like Captain Obvious, but from personal experience, I’ve found that saving a little bit every week helps enormously in the long run.

As an example, my socking away of $10 per week ultimately adds up to covering registration fees for my cars every year. No more groans of dismay as a chunk of money gets carved out of the checking account to pay my birthday taxes. Since I’ve already set money aside, I raid THAT account instead. And it’s only 10 bucks per week, hardly noticable in the grand scheme…

It took a long time to find the proper equilibrium of how much to funnel away into savings every week. A good year or so of trial-and-error, actually, since I have four savings accounts (cats, cars, vacation, and the “in case I end up unemployed, I can still pay the bills for a while” emergency fund). So long as you have the discipline to not touch the money you’ve moved, you’ll be all set. If your bank offers automatic/scheduled transfers, I’d suggest setting some up. Auto-pilot is awesome like that

Good luck with the “learning to live with what you have” part of #3. My hubby has what I refer to as the “ooo, shiny” gene in spades and it’s an ongoing challenge to reel him in on NOT buying something. I think the latest ‘shiny’ is a food processor/blender combo unit. Nevermind that we already have a blender AND a food processor that are fully functional. If we can get rid of them at a garage sale, THEN we’ll go buy the shiny new toy. Otherwise, I can’t think of anyone who’d need TWO blenders and TWO food processors, unless they worked at a restaurant or a bar.