Ugh - back to work today, which was fine, but difficult after two weeks off! I am very grateful to have a good job, though, so I'll stop complaining. The weather is horrible - this morning it was over 50 degrees and pouring rain on top of old layers of ice and snow. Now the temperature is rapidly dropping and everything is freezing solid. Lovely. Thankfully, most of the snow/ice on my front lawn melted, so I was able to get to my house from my car after work without too much danger. The driveway is a mess, so I need to be careful tomorrow morning. I live in a traditionally cold area, but somehow we are not experiencing quite the arctic blast that others are. It's only going down to 8 degrees tonight, which sounds pretty warm in comparison to what I've been hearing.

My paypal account verification is now complete, so I applied for my first $100 paypal swagbucks reward. For some reason, the process would not accept my cellphone number, so I need to wait for a verification code to arrive via postcard THROUGH THE MAIL in order to complete the reward application. Totally stone age!! After that process is finished, I will then apply for another $100 and then a $50 cash out. I officially hit 25,000 bucks late last night when the December bonuses were added to my account. I didn't earn the full monthly bonus amount, but I did get some. It will be fun to get my new Moto X phone for almost "free", but it did take a lot of time and effort to earn those 25,000 bucks, so not sure how much of a bargain it really is. Mr. money mustache had a discount code for republic wrless, but I didn't realize that it expired January 1, so I missed out. Darn, that would have been $19 off for the first month of the plan.

I am finally working on a financial to-do that has been on my list for many years. I have an older traditional IRA and a new Roth IRA at my credit union, both of which have never been invested except in a few CDs here and there. Quite sad, but I didn't take the time and effort to do anything with them. With the help of an advisor from the investment firm that my workplace uses for retirement accounts, the IRAs are now in the process of being transferred over to that company and I can begin slowly investing the money. Bummer that I'm doing this when the market is at a peak, but I'm going to only invest a bit each month for a while to take advantage of dollar cost averaging. I cringe when I think of how much larger the amounts in these accounts would be if I had invested them years ago, but at this point I can only accept reality and start now. I got a call from the investment firm and apparently I forgot to date one of the many places I signed on the paperwork, so now they are mailing me something so that I can correct the error. Ugh. Once the transfer is made, I will be able to look at all of my retirement funds from one website. I'm looking forward to that!

Today was a no-spend day and I should able to keep the spending down for the rest of the week as long as I stay away from any stores.

Hope everyone in the cold belt is staying warm tonight.