$$: GE Stock, Ballet Tickets, & Cell Phone

Ballet -- $104.15

Two tickets for The Son and I to go see a traditional production of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake.  The Son mentioned an interest in seeing this particular ballet about two months ago but I put off buying tickets because I was unsure of how my thyroidectomy was going to pan out.

Now that the surgery is behind me and I've made such a nice recovery, I've meaning to look into ticket availability but, well, you know how it is.  So today I just happened to think of it while sitting at my computer (where I was supposed to be working on spreadsheets, by the way).  Because I bought so close to the show date and there are only 4 shows left, I ended up getting two excellent seats for a nicely discounted price.  I could have saved even more by getting a student rate for The Son but that would have required buying the tickets in person at the box office (they need to see his student ID).  I decided that the extra trip downtown and the risk of losing the seats in the meantime weren't worth the time, effort, and risk.  After all, $100 was what I had budgeted for the event and our seats are much better than what I'd hoped for.

Sharebuilder -- $185.99

If you're a regular reader, you might remember that a while ago I posted about having transferred $200 from my WaMu checking account into my Sharebuilder account and promised to report back in when I ended up using the money.  Well, I've done it.

This was the first time I've ever done a "real-time" trade.  I like the flexibility of the real-time trade but I doubt I'll do very many more.  The cost of a real-time trade is $9.95 as opposed to an "automatic investment" (scheduled trade) which only costs $4.00/trade.

There are additional advantages and disadvantages to "Automatic Investments" through Sharebuilder but I think I'll save them for a later date.  The point of this particular post is to report that I purchased 9 shares of GE stock at $19.56 per share plus the $9.95 fee.

I'd been keeping my eye on GE ever since transferring those funds on the 10th.  Yes, I was trying to time the market.  Yes, I know it was silly.  Yes, I know the price has dropped even further.  Yes, I'll be transferring additional funds and making additional purchases of GE stock.  I know how a total of 42.28 shares of GE stock.  I am not at all sure that the price is anywhere near bottom at this point but I'm quite sure that GE will perservere and their stock price will recover and  eventually I'll make money -- even if it's for my grandchildren's gain.

[Interested in opening a Sharebuilder account?  Email me and I'll send you a referral email in response.  They'll give you $25 to invest!  Remember what Warren Buffet said, now is the time to invest.]

Verizon -- $128.96

The Husband paid our cell phone bill today.  We have a family plan that includes three cell phones, 700 shared minutes (but all calls to other Verizon customers are free and don't count toward our minutes), and unlimited texting.

I'm really torn about this whole cell phone thing:  I can't imagine life without one now and I really can't imagine having a teenaged driver out doing her thing without having a charged phone on her person at all times.  We're all much happier with Verizon's service than we were with our Sprint-through-our-local-carrier service before this but now that we're no longer bundled, we are paying more overall.

If it were up to me, we'd drop our local service as our long-distance phone provider but The Husband doesn't want to do that.  He still doesn't trust cell phones for long-distance business calls and he doesn't like to make them at his office because they charge him per long-distance call.  It's not like he makes very many business long-distance calls -- but when he does, he comes home and makes them from our land-line home phone.

I'm going to keep working on him and try to convince him that the cell phones are dependable enough to use for all of our long distance calls, even his business calls.  I've already shown him that we have plenty of minutes in our plan and, since most of our calls are made to other Verizon customers, that our days of paying through the nose for additional minute usage are long gone.  I'll get there eventually 

Related posts:

1. $$: Paint & an Investment Funds Transfer
2. Day 290: Stock Market, Gas, Shampoo, & Late Night Wendy’s
3. $$: Groceries, Investment, & House Painting Services
4. Day 265: Utilities, Groceries, and New Tunes
5. Day 90: Gutter Balls!