A couple of my husband's relatives stopped by last week. They both made comments that indicated in a roundabout way that they thought it's too bad we are living in such a place and not in something better. It made me upset. This run-down, small place is all we can afford to rent. Actually, business has been slow, and we've been dipping into our savings. I told my husband later that those types of comments, spoken or unspoken, are exactly why I decided not to have a graduation party for my son (who didn't really want one anyway except to please me). Some of the relatives are materialistic. When I'm not around them I do better at being content and thankful for what we do have (how I want to be), but it's not so easy when we see them because of their comments or because we don't fit into their conversations that mention world travels, expensive universities, or spending sprees. Blah.

In other news, after about six years, I finally switched back to WaMu bank as I noticed they offer free business and personal checking with free checks, free online bill pay, and a higher savings account interest rate than our old savings account. It's going to add up to quite a bit of extra money in our pockets. I should have switched sooner, but it's better late than never.

I pulled up some Quicken reports today, and here are the results:

Groceries:
4/19/07-04/18/08: $9864.66 ($822.06/mo.)
04/19/06-04/18/07: $7076.99 ($589.75/mo.)
Approximately 39% increase.

Dining out:
04/19/07-04/18/08: $488.15 ($40.68/mo.)
04/19/06-04/18/07: $496.89 ($41.41/mo.)
Consists mainly of husband's lunch buying. Except for going out to pizza twice, the last time we'd dined at a restaurant was while on vacation in January 2007.

This is for a family of four. We have to buy drinking water, and I do like to buy organic, all-natural type items (but don't always). I feel horrible about how much is spent on food. I've been trying to make a lot of stuff from scratch but, apparently, I need to do much more.

Haven't updated in quite awhile...

The title of this post is our oldest son's newest nickname. I've been feeling bad that we've postponed getting him braces. Now that he's about to turn 18, we've finally gone and paid for them. The actual cost is $5,581, which includes a 5% discount for paying the entire amount up front. I hope that was the right thing to do. Our savings account is only earning 2.75% right now so I figured I might as well, but I don't like paying that much money up front. Then there were the initial x-rays needed at an additional cost, so that brought the total close to $6,000.

Our health insurance premium had a huge increase over last year. I noticed on our auto insurance policy that they only updated our mailing address, not the address where the vehicles are parked, which still showed our old address (weird). I called and corrected that and got a rate hike adjustment as a reward. Ugh. And, of course, food and gas have gone up a lot. And I'm disappointed with how much less interest we're earning from our savings account with the lower rate we're getting now.

On the positive side...

It's been 15 months since we sold our house. I am so grateful we were able to sell it when we did with the way the house prices have dropped dramatically since then. I must say it's been quite nice to have no debt and some savings.

Work (construction) has been picking up for DH. Hopefully, we can start adding to the savings account again. We've been dipping into it this winter.

DH added insulation above the ceiling (BIL/landlord paid for materials), and I've begun to notice a big difference in the utility bill.

We got our vegetable garden in early. We had one cold night when the tomato plants got damaged, but they're growing back now. We've been remembering to cover them up on cold nights since then, and that has worked well.

I've renewed my efforts at cutting down the grocery bill, an area I know has room for improvement. We'll see how that goes. My goal is to cut it down enough to eventually "pay" for my son's braces.

DH went to his friend's property and shot two wild turkeys. The neighbors were hoping he'd kill more because they are completely overrun with them. The turkeys poop all over their homes, chase their little dogs and eat all the dog food, and make an early morning racket, not allowing people to sleep. So I guess we'll be having our fill of turkey meals for a while.

Our income has been steady lately and above what we made year-to-date last year. We have no medical bills due and finally got all our needed dental work done, costing about $2,000. Now I am finally going to make an appointment for our 17yo to get the braces he's needed.

I just finished reading Lou's On First, a biography of Lou Costello written by his daughter. I've always loved the Abbott & Costello movies, so this was very interesting reading for me. A big part of the book was about how he went from no money, to being rich, and then losing all or most of it. Same thing happened to Bud Abbott. The book is a good manual for demonstrating what NOT to do with money.

http://www.wdrake.com/WalterDrake/Shopping/ProductDetail.asp...

My stepdaughter got married, and we paid for a couple of wedding related expenses, plus there were airline, hotel, and dining expenses incurred in order to attend the wedding.

Then the transmission in my car started acting up. On the way to the car shop, the car ran fine. Figures. The mechanic took the car out for long drives on several occasions over the course of a couple of days to see what was going on with my car, but the car continued to run fine. In the end, he didn't do anything except change the transmission fluid. So all that cost us $142. But I'm very thankful that the car seems okay for now and that it didn't cost us thousands to repair, at least not yet.

This wasn't the best month to do it, but I got a used entertainment center off craigslist for $100. For the last seven months since we've moved here, we've been using an upside-down laundry basket as a tv stand. The house we sold had built-in shelving, so we didn't own a free-standing unit. I must say, it's a great improvement over the laundry basket.

Pulled up a Quicken report on my grocery spending. A record $942 for June! July was also extra high at $778 (if I remember correctly). I really need to get back to concentrating on lowering the grocery expenses! I feel kind of sick about spending that much for a family of four. So I'm going to monitor this spending category much more closely.

My husband completed a bathroom remodel job today. The customer had ordered a $5,000 24k gold-plated and crystal bathroom sink. They also ordered a $1,500 shower fixture. DH was sweating bullets while handling and installing these and other expensive items, afraid he would scratch or damage them. I can't imagine us having to replace them if he had damaged them. That would have been seriously depressing. Thankfully, nothing happened.

I also can't imagine how rich I'd have to be before I felt like spending that much money on a sink. Don't think I'd ever want to, no matter how much I had.

The bill for the local builders' exchange membership came due, and I finally decided to cancel our membership rather than pay it. We'd been members for many years. Except for one or two small jobs they referred to us quite a long time ago, we haven't acquired any work through them. The only benefit we have been receiving through them is a discounted group rate on our workers comp. insurance. The other day I pulled up a report in Quickbooks and did some math. I calculated that, because we haven't had much payroll the past six or so years and, therefore, didn't get much of a workers comp. discount, we could have been saving about $375/year by NOT being a member of the builders' exchange and switching our workers comp. to an individual policy. I've been kicking myself for not bothering to do the math sooner. But what's done is done, and all I can do is add this to my list of financial blunders and move on. At least it felt good ripping up the membership bill and tossing it in the garbage.

Got a check for $40 from the title company that dealt with our house sale back in January. I remember catching some errors on the closing statement and getting a snooty, unapologetic attitude from the woman there when I pointed them out and asked they be corrected. The much larger errors were fixed, but there still was a smaller amount that didn't seem right on the revised statement. I was too stressed out to bother with it anymore after the whole process of selling and moving.

So now I get a check from them with a letter stating I should have received this additional $40 at close of escrow. There is no apology for the error or for taking six months to correct it. They did put in bolded print, "Please keep in mind this check will become stale dated after 60 days of the issuance date of the check." The last sentence reads, "We trust that this transaction has been handled to your satisfaction and look forward to the opportunity of seeing you again in the near future." Somehow I don't think I'll ever feel inclined to use them again.

Well, it's not quite done, but this is how my first sock is coming out. I was so excited about finally making it around the heel successfully.

As if Blue Cross isn't taking enough of my money already, I just read their notification informing me that I will now be charged a $2 fee for each paper bill. Argh. I must choose to have automatic electronic debits to avoid the fee, but I can't stand having automatic deductions. I've tried it before, and it makes me feel like I'm not in control of my own money. And I would always forget when a deduction was going to occur and have to scramble to avoid bouncing checks. I'll stick to paper billing as long as I can.

I'm now doing housecleaning for a relative for 2-3 hours per week. It's not much, but the little bit of extra money will help.

I browse various knitting and crocheting forums and blogs. I am amazed at the number of people who have accumulated enough yarn to open their own small (or not so small) yarn store. They show pictures of giant masses of yarn that they probably couldn't use up in their lifetime, yet they continue to buy more. And they joke about their yarn accumulation addictions with each other. A lot of them choose to buy wool yarn only, which can be quite expensive, rather than the cheaper acrylics. (Certain wools might cost around $200 to have enough to knit one sweater.) So some of them have several thousands of dollars of yarn sitting around. One woman counted her stash of almost 1000 skeins/balls of yarn, which can run about $3 to maybe $15 each.

I just can't help but wonder what their financial pictures look like.

Turned in some plastic recyclables today and got $3.70. They wouldn't pay me for the glass, even though their web site said they would pay by the pound. The guy said they only pay for glass that shows a redemption value. Oh well. Getting $3.70 back is much better than having our garbage service pick up the stuff and getting nothing back. So I think I will keep it up. The recycle place is right next to the grocery store where I sometimes shop, so I don't waste any money in gas either.

Medical bills once again......

My son fell and got a small bump on his forehead that was some blood vessel thingy (forgot the medical term) that would not go away. I took him to the dermatologist who explained what it was. He then numbed it (a few seconds), snipped it off (one second), cauterized it (one second), and slapped a bandaid on it (two seconds). Total bill: $726.00. My insurance reduced it by $260.77, leaving my portion to pay at $465.23. Plus add another $35 co-pay for the first visit to the family doctor who sent us to the dermatologist. My total out-of-pocket expense is $500.23.

My husband and I are self-employed so I know all about overhead expenses, but come on.....I am just disgusted and really bummed out.

This month is a tough month. The semi-annual worker compensation insurance premium was due. It was about $500 less than I had earlier estimated, which I was happy about, but we still had to pay quite a chunk. Estimated quarterly taxes were due. And it was also time to buy more homeschooling curriculum, which ended up being more costly than usual. Also, I received our first garbage bill at our new residence. The garbage bill is for this past quarter plus the next quarter in advance, and it is about $300. That's almost four times more than the garbage rate in our previous town. Yikes.

The good news is that I haven't had to pull out any money from the savings account to pay for anything so far. I wish we could add to the savings, but that probably won't happen in the near future as we need to get some dental work done.

I went to realtor.com and found a house in our old subdivision that was the exact model we owned. I looked at all the interior pictures, and it all brought back so many memories. I felt very homesick for my house that we had to sell. Well, I guess that was a really dumb thing for me to do!

Some friends are selling their home here and moving to the Portland, OR area. We've already checked out a couple of areas in Oregon and might go up this summer to check out the Portland area as well. We keep talking about moving to a more affordable state, but it is a hard decision when we've lived here all our lives and all my family is here.

I took what was left of the house sale money and put it in an eloan.com savings account. It feels great to be earning interest rather than paying it. But I am very concerned about our savings getting drained because business has been slow, medical insurance premiums went up again, and other expenses have popped up.

When I no longer had a mortgage, the bank started charging my checking account $15/month because I no longer had bundled services with them. With other things going on, it took me two months of getting charged this fee before I did something about it. Now I have a $5/month basic checking account. So $120/year saved there.

Thought I'd attempt blogging here again. Some time back I had deleted all my entries after getting too discouraged and overwhelmed about the bad state (mostly due to medical expenses) of our finances. We have since sold our home and have been in the process of making final payments for our various debts. We also now have some savings in the bank too. I do miss my little home and wish we could have kept it, but it is much nicer to have the heavy weight of debt off our shoulders. Barring some huge, unexpected windfall, we will likely never be able to afford to own a home in this state. We are now renting a 2BR/1BA place, which will be fine once we finally get settled in. Still have boxes stacked all over the place.

After the house sold, we tossed our belongings into the rental and then took off on a month-long vacation out of state to visit my in-laws and our daughter and her family. We sure needed to get away and relax after all the pressures that had been going on. And it was a frugal trip as far as not having to pay for lodging or food while staying with the in-laws. We did splurge at the stores a bit for the kids and ourselves, but it was considered to be Christmas spending as we didn't spend at Christmas time since the house sale hadn't quite closed yet. (The older child living at home understood, and the younger one didn't know the difference.)

Anyway, on to a fresh start....