Two ways I paid the Stupid Tax

I wasn’t sure how to illustrated the whole stupid tax concept, so, um, here’s this.

I’ve actually never read any of Dave Ramsey’s books, but quite a bit of his stuff floats around the blogosphere; enough for me to pick up on his Stupid Tax concept (which is basically any really dumb financial decision you make).

It’s always fun to read about other people’s stupid decisions, so I thought I’d share two of mine.

1. BlueHost

(which I never used)

I used Dreamhost to run this blog, and a few years back, their service got kind of hicuppy. I was pretty patient about it at first, but after a really bad week, I got frustrated and signed up with BlueHost. I think I paid $100, which would have covered a year’s worth of hosting*.

*that was when my blog was a lot smaller…$100 doesn’t even cover one month’s hosting now.

I know Bluehost is a good company and I knew the service would be good.

What I totally underestimated, though, is how complicated it would be to move everything from Dreamhost to Bluehost. I can do some back end things on my blog, but this was over my head.

This would have been no big deal if I’d had my wits about me enough to cancel my BlueHost package in the first 30 days. But somehow, that deadline slipped right by me, and so I ended up paying for a year of hosting that I never even used.

Anyway, Dreamhost has stepped up their game and I’ve had very little downtime in the last year or two, so I’ve decided to just hang out where I am.Although, now that I think about it, I might be paying a stupid tax by not shopping around to see if another web host could offer me a better price. If I could save a lot of money on my hosting, I could even pay someone to do the dirty work of moving my blog.

Hmmm.

2. A Slideshow Program

My photo-editing software library pretty much consists of….Picasa.

And that’s all.

(I am sooo professional.)

Picasa does have a feature that allows you to make picture slideshows with music, but it was lacking some features that I wanted. And when my niece was stillborn (more on that story and the happy ending that came a few years later), I really wanted to make a lovely CD slideshow for her mom and dad, using the pictures I’d taken.

And at that point, I thought I wanted to spend more time doing photo sessions (I have since changed my mind), and I figured it would be a good tool for building my photography business.

So, I paid for the software (I think it was $100. My stupid taxes seem to always be $100!), and got to work, only to realize that the software only let you make slideshows to share on the web.

Oops.

I did eventually end up figuring out how to make Picasa do what I wanted it to do, so I gave my sister-in-law a CD slideshow after all, and I also made a scrapbook of the pictures.

In that sense, it all worked out fine in the end, but I do try to be a little more careful to pay attention to what I’m buying now!

So, there you go…two dumb things I did with my money.

Care to embarrass yourself along with me? Feel free to leave a stupid tax story of your own in the comments. 😉

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P.S. Gina is the winner of the $75 Cozy Wall Art giveaway. Congrats, Gina!