Mini-Murphy’s Sister
Just when the dryer problem was solved, here comes another one: Elise’s crib broke. One of the slats broke apart, so now the crib is considerably unsafe and unusable. We have no problems having her sleep with us (except for the spinning/moving she does), but with the upcoming birth of Little One; we know we need to get a new crib or some place for her to sleep in (one part for Grandma’s ease and one part because LO will be sleeping with us!).
We are thinking about maybe using this time to transition her into a non-crib bed, which may or may not work. What to transition her is what we’re stuck on, given our lack of space situation we don’t have very many options. The safest for her would be a mattress on the floor in a baby-proofed room. A toddler bed may work, but the whole “escape factor” is what we’re worried about.
Time to put on our thinking caps! :S Let’s just hope the crib was the LAST THING TO BREAK before Little One comes.
Dryer Update
Well, Greg looked at the dryer Saturday morning. No loose wires, blown fuses or anything like that; so we are thinking it’s the switch that went kaput. Greg got the switch out, called an appliance shop, and had a new switch ordered for … $27.50. Shipping is included, so that’s handy. It should be in on Wednesday and God-willing; that’s the ONLY thing wrong with it and I can have my dryer back. 
I did turn Greg’s Mom on to using dryer balls to shorten drying time (and add a little bit of softness to clothes and towels and such), so now we both have our sets of dryer balls. I bought a set when I ran out of dryer sheets (yeah, I know); and honestly, why didn’t I get them earlier?
Major Dad’s surgery went really well (despite it taking for.ev.er. to do it) and he’s recovering better than we expected, given the nature of the surgery and his age. So now we’re back to “come out, come out soon Little One!”. Major Dad thinks LO will be here sometime between the 14th and the 18th. I totally agree with him, but I’ll admit I’ll be a little bummed if we make it to the due date. We want to talk to Dr. M about evicting Little One and the process that entails; and then do our research so we can know what will be going on and decline things if we decide it’s not in ours or LO’s best interest. We do trust Dr. M but we like to be informed consumers as to what’s going on, if you know what I mean.
Mini-Murphy
I discovered today that our dryer no longer starts. It’s been a quick succession of failure, which started when it no longer needed to be turned on to start – just changing the dial to a new cycle was enough to turn it on (I noticed that last week). Now, it’s definitely not starting. I did some looking on the manufacturer’s website; which of course is all about having a service call made and blah blah blah. Considering I’m teetering on the verge of labor (today has had a definite upswing of Braxton Hicks contractions, plenty of pressure, and all sorts of fun); I’m NOT going to wait for a “service call” to happen nor am I going to just not do laundry.
Since we bought the dryer as a “scratch and dent” type thing from Lowe’s (the person returned it saying it was “loud” – their technicians couldn’t figure out why it was loud, and it’s not loud to us), there’s already no warranty or anything like that. Since one half of the House Building Crew is currently having a surgery performed; this frees up Greg’s weekend to fix the dryer.
The nice thing is that the biggest wank we have about said dryer not working is that I have to haul our wet clothes to Greg’s Mom’s dryer, dry them there, and then haul them back. We have money that we can use to replace whatever part is needed (hopefully it’s just that) – so there’s really no stress in the sense of “how are we going to pay for this?!” going on. Thank God for the budget, that’s for sure.
Hopefully the dryer just needs a new switch and Nothing Massive – but if the worst case scenario of having to replace the dryer were to happen, we could do it, pay in cash, and laugh ourselves silly; because one year ago, we couldn’t do that.
March Shopping Trip 1
I decided to do something different with the March grocery run, mainly do a major purge of the freezer and pantry contents. This will finish off our meat stockpile, and unless Little One comes in the next two weeks; the only thing we’ll have left in our freezer is some corn and a bag of stir-fry veggies.
Our dinners:
Split pea and ham soup (crock-pot recipe book), turkey pot pie (my mom’s recipe), spaghetti with Italian sausage, biscuits and gravy, easy pot roast (crock-pot recipe book), chili (crock-pot recipe book), stir-fry, slow cooker beef au jus, jambalaya, pork chops and rice, BBQ pork, sweet mustard roast, fish and potatoes, tuna pasta
We didn’t need that many groceries this time around, mainly because I sought out recipes that utilized what we had on hand. We ended up getting:
Walmart:
2.5 pounds of Granny Smith apples – $3.41
One green pepper – $0.94
Cereal – $3.64 less $0.75 coupon = $2.89
Kashi cereal – $3.28 less $3.28 coupon = FREE
1 pound deli ham – $2.71
1/2 pound hard salami – $2.34
1 pound turkey pastrami – $2.95
1/4 pound baby Swiss – $1.25
Au jus mix – $0.96
Mustard – $0.96
Beef broth – $0.86
Cream of Potato soup – $1.26
Tuna – $0.77
Tea – $2.24 less $0.50 coupon = $1.74
Total: $22.99
Albertson’s
Butter – $1.79
2 pounds 85/15 ground beef – $4.35
1 onion – $0.27
Total: $6.40
Dollar Store
Cookies – $1.00
Apple bars – $1.00
Hot chocolate – $1.00
Total: $3.00
Grand total: $32.39, leaving $27.61 to get us to the next payday. This will be really handy should Little One come in the next two weeks, as Greg can use the remaining grocery budget to get himself food when I’m in the hospital (since my food is covered by insurance, but we would have to pay $7/meal for him – may as well go to the grocery store!).
You can tell that I’m getting more and more uncomfortable/tired/ready to deliver as a lot of the meals lately have either been crock-potted or boxed; even though I am capable of making things from scratch. Once Little One gets here and we’re all recovered and adjusted I can go back to that; but for now, as long as we’re fed I’m sort of not caring how. Just as long as it’s not crappy fast food. 
Progress is addicting
Taking care of things like balancing the checkbook this morning, I decided to check and see if the lender had applied my payment to my part of THE BEAST. Sure enough, they did. And this makes me a happy camper – the total balance is really under $40K and about half went to principal, and half to interest. I can live with that.
*happy dance*
Now that I know all the lenders have received the checks and processed them; I can go balance the checkbook without too much drama. Maybe a couple of them will have cashed the said checks.
Headway
I checked our local student loan balances (of the four, two are serviced locally and two are out of state). Good news and bad news.
The good news is that my local loan – also the smallest student loan we have – got hit HARD on the principal. Only $6 went to interest, the rest to that glorious principal. It’s so nice to see it lowered significantly.
Greg’s local loan – not so much. Despite getting the March payment in under 30 days from the last payment, only $26 went to the principal and the rest interest. So that mega-loan is barely going down. And since I have the other half of the loan debt with about the same interest, I’m expecting the same thing to be posted (once the lender decides to post it).
I’m trying to remain positive about everything, even the principal going down by $26 is better than it going up. Or just staying the same. Once Little One is here and the birth is paid for, we are going to take the rest and pay off as many loans as possible (best case would be my local loan and my Perkins loan) and then snowball the living daylights out of the remainder of what’s left. It’s fun saving money and all that but another reason why I’m ready to deliver is to start sending in snowballs of additional principal payments on the loans. I guess it’s much more fun to watch principal go down than balances go up. 
Best part about this: no additional stupid tax was paid. YAY!!
Some mighty fine SL related stupid tax
There is an estimated $730 billion in outstanding federal and private student-loan debt, says Mark Kantrowitz of FinAid.org, a Web site that tracks financial-aid issues — and only 40% of that debt is actively being repaid. The rest is in default, or in deferment, which means that payments and interest are halted, or in “forbearance,” which means payments are halted while interest accrues.
- The $550,000 Student Loan Burden
Ouch (on the $730B and the 40% part). And I don’t particularly feel bad for the woman in the article, especially at this part:
“Maybe half of it was my fault because I didn’t look at the fine print,” Dr. Bisutti says. “But this is just outrageous now.”
Maybe half of it was your fault? Half? I hate to be harsh, but SERIOUSLY? Even though we got tripped up on the daily interest nonsense, we at least understand the basic formula of student loans (and loans in general): borrow money == pay back what you borrowed + interest.
*headdesk*
And speaking of student loans, we sent off our March payments already – within 30 days from our last payment – so HOPEFULLY the majority of the payment will go to principal, not interest.
February Trip 2 List
I re-tweaked the last part of February’s menu to account for Ash Wednesday and to use up some roast in the freezer. I think we did pretty good this time around.
Walmart
Cereal – $5.12 (less $0.75 coupon, $4.37)
Chili -2 cans at $0.97
Ground beef – 2.25 pounds, $4.23
Spaghetti sauce – 2 at $1.98 (less $1.00 off two, $2.96)
Cheese – 1 pound, $3.88
Red beans and rice mix – $1.47
Cream of Potato Soup – 2 cans at $1.26
Clams – 2 cans at $1.38
Pizza crusts – 2 at $0.52
Pizza sauce – $1.14
Manwich – $1.00
Ham steaks – $2.98
Tortilla chips – $2.00
Ramen – $1.98
Scalloped potaotes – 2 boxes at $1.00
Tuna fish – $0.77
Tea – $2.24 (less $0.50 coupon, $1.74)
1 pound of black forest ham – $3.50
1 pound turkey pastrami – $2.98
1/2 pound hard salami – $2.34
Oreos – $2.19 (less $2.19 with coupon, FREE)
Total: $49.04
Safeway
Chicken breasts, 2 pounds – $2.02
Pita Chips – $4.99 (less $5.99 with coupon, FREE + overage)
Total: $1.02
A few things that we noticed:
- It’s a better value for us to buy cheese and milk in bulk from Costco.
- If you go up to the deli at Walmart right before it closes, you can buy the already sliced meat for half off. The black forest ham was $7/pound, we purchased a pound for $3.50
- We really lucked out with the pita chips coupon, because we had overage that was applied to our purchase of chicken breasts. We saved a total of $10.66 (91%!!) at Safeway between coupons and their little club card. A grand total of $15.89 saved between coupons and club card at Walmart and Safeway.
Our grand total was $50.06, and we have about $10-15 budgeted for milk and cheese. We’re still on track quite nicely, and we don’t feel deprived or anything like that in our eating.
Budgeting SUCCESS!
I just now realized that another pay period has ended and a new one has begun. January’s budget was pretty loose to allow for groceries (mainly putting perishables back into our purchases) and to just get used to a budget – finding out what works and what didn’t. Our first budget off of Greg’s “new job” paycheck is basically lived off of, and it went really, really well. I know I need to up grocery a leeeeetle bit more (it doesn’t hep Mama’s having crazy milk cravings), but other than that; we stayed on budget exactly. Everything we bought had a spot SOMEWHERE in the budget, and we had absolutely zero overspending and no impulse buys. We came close – really close – but it didn’t happen because of the budget.
We also found out that when we’re Stressed Out is when we’re more inclined to impluse buy, mainly for fast food. Thanks to the budget and the menu plan, we were able to resist.
Tonight Greg and I get to make a new budget for the paycheck of the pay period that just ended. We need to tweak our stupid student loan payments so it doesn’t get eaten up by interest, and we can do our monthly Date Night and distribute out blow money. And finish up Little One’s cloth diaper stash – hurray!
Happy, happy, happy!
Why we don’t do “credit”
It’s been about 2.5 months since we stopped using our credit card totally. We’ve gone to a mixture of cash and using the debit card, and surprisingly; we have a lot more money on our hands. Granted, paying off the credit card bill and the car loan is helping that out; but not (over)spending the credit card is a BIG help.
For most of our married life, Greg has been the Accountant/Financial Guy. In that, he took care of the money and made sure we had a savings; and I paid the bills with the said money. This meant I was happily oblivious to our credit card, mainly those little things called FINANCE CHARGES.
In December I remember looking at the credit card statement for some reason and saw a line: “FINANCE CHARGE: $19.99″. $20 EXTRA that we had to pay to the credit card company.
$20 x 12 months = $240 in finance charges for last year.
That’s a lot of money that we could have used for MUCH better things. Like well, food. Date night. Anything but giving it to the credit card company.
Seeing that little line on the statement was my “credit card conversion” and basically; that was the end of the credit card for both of us. Now that we have 1) a budget 2) cash/debit card system and 3) paid off the card; we’re a lot more picky about what we spend our money on. It hurts to shell out cash or use the debit card a LOT more than using the credit card. We use the debit card at places that automatically take the money THAT MOMENT from our account, so it’s an instant “we better have needed X, because we’re Y poorer now.” instead of “la la la, just charge it and we’ll pay it later!” We did that so many times in our married life, and later always became MUCH later because Life Happened and suddenly; we were carrying a balance.
I know plenty of people who charge and pay, or use a card for the “rewards”. Personally; we’d rather not tempt Life and just cash flow what we need. If we don’t have the money, we can’t buy it. It’s amazing how many people have said “but why don’t you guys just charge X, Y, or Z?” or “Greg’s making good money now, you can afford to use a credit card.” or even mock us at the idea of saving up money for something. Saving up money has cut down on the amount of impulse buys (mainly me 
) happening and really making sure we get the most bang for our buck. Overspending is WAY down, and ta-da; our savings account is the beefiest we’ve ever seen it. Including when Greg and I were both working and bringing home about $25/hour combined.
I know a lot of people LOVE LOVE LOVE their credit cards (I was one!), so don’t take this post personally if you are one of those. It’s not my goal, but rather to flesh out in my mind why we don’t use credit cards as to appease those who think we are ABSOLUTELY INSANE for not.