Deadlines. Is the concept hard to understand?

why do some individuals try to squeak past the deadline?

I work for a fairly big organization and employees are treated to a yearly Children’s Christmas Party.  Having fairly young children, I’ve attended this party for the past two years.  And although I understand that the event is free for my family and I, and the kids do receive a gift, I always leave the party thinking it could’ve been better.

This year rather than cross my fingers and hope that the party has gotten better, I decided to volunteer to convene this party.  That way if I left the party thinking it could’ve been better, I’d only have myself to blame.

One of the first items I had to cross off my to-do list was to get the event announcement and registration form published in our bi-weekly company newsletter.  The announcement was published on September 9^th and I indicated a registration deadline for October 21^st.  I also noted that REGISTRATIONS WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED PAST THE OCTOBER 21^ST DEADLINE.

I truly felt that a 6 week registration period provided ample time for parents to register themselves and their kids.  On top of the published announcement, department reps also sent out email announcements reminding employees of the party and registration deadline.  During the 6 week registration period, a total of 3 email announcements were sent out.

By the end of the 6 week registration period I had a total of 400 submitted registration forms.  The Monday following October 21^st, the emails started to arrive:

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“I've been really busy here at work & my kids have been sick with ear infections so I missed a few days last week and missed the deadline. Is there anything I can do to still be able to make it?”

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“Due to unforeseen circumstances, I was away from work from Sep 28 to today Nov 1.  This was due to illness.

I am hoping that I might still be able to register my two sons for the Children’s Christmas party this year.”

***

“Can you tell me when we were told of the event and how to register?  I don’t recall seeing anything and am surprised to see it is already full.  Any chance of more spaces being available?”

***

I understand that life can get busy and unforeseen circumstances can happen, but you can’t use that as an excuse for not meeting the registration deadline.  What I find amusing about the three excuses above is that although they were busy or away from work, there was still time during the 6 week registration period to submit the registration form.

What I’ve also noticed is that all the individuals emailing me regarding registrations past the deadline were women.  And they all tried to pull the heart strings and were hoping that I’d feel empathy towards their situation.  If this situation were to have happened 2 years ago, I could definitely see myself accepting the late registrations.  What happened between then and now?  I can’t really pinpoint the moment, but somehow I’ve now got the “You snooze, you lose” mentality.

And perhaps 2 years ago, I may have tried to squeak in past a deadline.  Today if I’ve missed a deadline, I quickly realize that I only have myself to blame and I move on.  I don’t think of ways to get around the deadline.

Have you tried to squeak by a deadline?  How did it turn out?

Feeling a little defeated...

It's Sunday night and I'm feeling quite defeated.  I'm feeling defeated with my healthy eating, our financial spending this weekend and work documents that I'm struggling to complete.

Healthy Eating

Earlier this year, I purchased a pair of denim jeans that I absolutely love.  They were the most expensive pair of jeans I've ever purchased but were totally worth it.  They look great worn casually and can be dressed up with a sexy pair of heels.  I tried on the jeans yesterday and I couldn't get the zipper up :(

I stepped on the scale and noticed a weight gain of 3 pounds.  Not a huge amount, but enough to make the jeans too tight for me to wear.  It wasn't a good feeling.  And so I asked DH to help me get back into shape (and into my jeans) before J turned 3 years old.  I've always had a goal to get back to my pre-pregnancy weight and for the past couple years, I've simple told myself that I'm still working on it.  J is turning 3 years old at the end of February and I refuse to continue to tell myself that I'm still working on getting back to my pre-pregnancy weight.  It shouldn't take 3 years.

We were at a birthday party yesterday, and I think I did okay in terms of not eating everything I wanted to eat.  I chose a few dishes and enjoyed my meal.  Today, we had family over and we ended up ordering in pizza and szechuan pork.  So good, but it really hurt the healthy eating for today.  It started out well, I had a light breakfast - coffee and 2 slices of toast, but then for lunch I had a cheeseburger and then followed up with a slice of pizza, a bowl of potato chips and some szechuan pork.


Not feeling too great about all the food I ate today.  But I'm focused on trying to stick to my healthy eating tomorrow.


Finances
So I did my weekly check to get an idea of where the money went this week.  And for the first time, I noticed a maintenance service charge of $20 coming out of our savings account.  I did a quick history search, and the $20 fee wasn't a consistent monthly fee.  Some months it was $2 or $3, another month it was $16.  This had caught me completely off guard and I feel absolutely ridiculous for not paying closer attention to the fees that were coming out of the account.  It truly sucks to know that I pretty much threw that money away.  Tomorrow I will be going to the bank to close the savings account because I simply cannot justify having to pay the maintenance service fees.  We still have our ING direct savings account, so that will become our primary savings account.


Work
I have been struggling with completing one specific work document.  This document has been on my to-do list for the past week, and I cannot get focused on it.  As soon as I open up the document, I'm tempted to do something else, anything else.  The original due date for the document was the end of October.  Then I pushed it out to November 3rd, and now it's November 6th and I'm still not done.  What's even worse, is it's Sunday night and I should be relaxing and getting ready for the work week, but instead I'm trying to get some work done on this document.  Of course, I'm not trying as this very moment, seeing that I'm currently typing out this post.  I'm telling myself that once I've published this post, I will try working on the document once more.  I'm not looking forward to work this week, just don't have the motivation in me.  Luckily it's a 4-day work week, Remembrance day is on Friday which means an upcoming 3-day weekend.  I just hope to survive the next 4 days and to get this document done.


Overall, our spending this week was pretty good.  We spent a little extra on a gift for the birthday party we went to on Saturday.  We actually just got the invitation late on Friday, so this was an unexpected expense for us this week.  We also had to get an oil change on Friday.  It turns out one of the tires is leaking and could not be repaired, so the spare tire was put on (for a $10 charge) and we are now needing a new spare tire.  Good news is that all bills have been paid, groceries have been bought and the vehicle gas tank is full.  Bad news is that last week we had to dip into our savings account to make it to our next paydays, so the balance isn't much at all.  That's okay though, I'll transfer the remaining amount from the savings account into the chequing account and close the savings account.  Ideally I'd like to switch completely to a no-fee account but I'm dreading the transferring of automatic payments (mortgage, car payment, house insurance, etc...)


Okay, time to focus on my work document.  If I can make some good progress on the document, I'm sure I'll sleep well tonight.

Well HELLO! “Insufficient funds” nice to finally meet you

Up until last night, I’ve not had the pleasure (throw in sarcasm) of meeting “Insufficient funds”. 

It was pay day for me on Tuesday and as I’ve always done in the past, I logged into our online bank account and started paying bills that were due.  My flaw in budgeting is not knowing the details of when automatic payments come out of the account.  Maybe I think that the house insurance comes out on the 5^th of each month, but it’s actually being withdrawn on the 2^nd of each month.  I never really paid attention to the actual dates, I just know that it’s withdrawn the first week of each month.

I knew that DH got paid on Thursday, so I believed that there’s be enough money in the account to pay for the groceries we picked up last night.  Luckily I had gone through the Self-Checkout line at the supermarket, it would have been quite embarrassing to have my debit payment declined and have the cashier tell me that the reason was insufficient funds.  Although DH was with me at the supermarket, he didn’t notice that I had to retry the payment, this time using money from our savings account.

I was very surprised with the insufficient funds message.  It caught me completely off guard.  Immediately my thoughts went to what other payments I may have forgotten and whether or not I caused any automatic withdrawals/payments to be returned, resulting in a $35 NSF fee.  As soon as we got home, I logged into our online bank account and saw that there was still $20 sitting in our chequing account.  The grocery total was $24 which obviously is more than what we had.  I looked at the detailed transactions and saw that there were no returned automatic withdrawals/payments.  PHEW!  That was a huge sigh of relief.  I would not have been very happy if I logged in to see a $35 NSF fee.

This is an eye-opener for me and has validated my feelings that more attention is needed on our budget.  Although our credit card use is very rare, I’m not proactively tracking our cash spending.  it would be very beneficial to be able to post a weekly spending recap.

“insufficient funds”, it was nice meeting you and there are lessons for me to take away from our encounter, and I hope I don’t hurt your feelings too much, but I am determined to never cross paths again.  It will be the best thing for everyone.