Welcome to Money Mondays!

 I used to post my financial inflows and outflows on Fridays in the past but I decided to move this to Mondays instead. Normally I go grocery shopping on Sundays after church. Now I will post the last week’s worth of financial inflows and outflows on Monday so that I can include the weekend spending as well.

(If you are not reading this post at www.howisavemoney.net or in your feed reader, it may have been stolen from my site.)

This week my financial outflows were:

$1768.49 for a new laptop. My other laptop has been acting crazy lately and then I got a hard drive failed error. This laptop is barely TWO years old and it has failed. My laptop prior to that was from a different brand and lasted over NINE years. This includes a couple of drops from the desk onto carpet and two international flights. I travelled a lot during grad school and took it with me every time. I was more careful with this one and really do not understand what happened. It began running really slowly and freezing on the simplest tasks. Then it would restart constantly and get stuck on the startup screen.

Sometimes it would refuse to start no matter how long I held the power button and would just make a clicking noise…only to randomly start about 30 minutes after I walked away.

This unreliability was annoying and I would have to pay to ship it to their store to get it fixed. My warranty conveniently expired a short while before this so the cost was getting a bit up there. While it would be cheaper to ship and get a new hard drive I realize I really hate this brand. I’ve had issues with the laptop and customer service from the day I placed the order and I would rather go back to the other brand. 

I know what I am dealing with there and the customer service was much better. I did a LOT of research into this new laptop and got some of the upgrades, which added to the cost. I would rather pay close to $2k and have an experience where I could have a long lasting laptop than what I just got. There is no guarantee, but if the old one lasted over nine years I expect this new one to last quite a few, based on my usage.

This purchase has the effect of pushing back my savings goal a little bit. I planned on saving $3,000 this month but now I can only put $1,231 in savings. This is okay since I am still putting a good sized amount into my goal account.

I earned $166.84 cash back from this purchase by going through Rakuten so that makes this cash outflow a little easier to bear!