Bills Out of Control

I do not know what has been going on this past month but the bills hit me like a ton of bricks! This weekend I will go through each bill and see what can be done to reduce the amount owed next month.

Wow! All that goes on inside the house is far more expensive than the house on a monthly basis! Does this mean after 30 years the house will be all mine and I will own all the utility companies too?

Now for the strategy to get things back to normal

House Gas ($250) - Get on the monthly plan BEFORE winter hits again. (heating & cooking still paying for winter use)

Electric ($71.23) - Maybe go around and unplug everything except the microwave, computer and my alarm clock. But I love my air fresheners so I will keep the fresheners in the bathrooms and the kitchen plugged in.

Phone ($187.29 ) - Apparently I forgot to pay last month's bill and there is a $30 late fee. Make sure never to be late with a payment again. $30 late fee on a $75 bill? That is almost HALF the cost! Go over phone plan to see what can be changed. I still want the "long distance any time, any where plan." What is the deal with Local Long Distance? Shouldn't it be either Local or Long Distance? Not with this area. Apparently you pay for Local, Local Long Distance and Long Distance.

Cable ($154.23) - Will sit the children (teens) down for a long talk about the use of Movies On Demand. There is a channel for FREE Movies On Demand, we have a vast variety of movies on tape and DVD if they get bored with the FMOD channel. We do have cable for-crying-out-loud. There must be SOMETHING on TV to watch, if you must watch TV, with all those bazillion channels we get. If not there are always the board games to play or work around the house to be done.

Cell Phone ($71.23) - I have the everything, everywhere, bells and whistles, tons of minutes, unlimited super-duper plan. My sister and I talk almost every day for two hours or more. I need my cell phone with it's blue tooth capabilities. This allows me to chat with her and continue with the housework, craft project, shopping, yard work or whatever I happen to have planned at that time. I can take my cell phone anywhere with me so our conversations are not interrupted by what activity I am doing at the time. I really should review my plan. Although I use my cell phone to great extent with my sister and family I lost around 2,000 minutes after rolling them over for more than 2 years.

Daycare ($468) - Yeah, school will start and Daycare will go down to $388 due to part time care instead of full time. That will save me $80 per month.

Car Payment ($349) - I am actually going to increase this to at least $600 per month. I will send in a separate check for $251 with "Towards Principal Only" written in the memo section on the check. This should lower the amount of interest owed each month and will pay the car off a lot sooner which will rid me of this monthly bill.

Car Gas ($120) - It is what it is. Last weekend the price of gas went from $2.95 to $2.75 per gallon for Regular Unleaded. This week it dropped down to $2.65 per gallon. It still feels like it costs the same to fill up my tank $51.54 for one tank full. I remember the good old days of 2003 when I could fill up my Lincoln Town Car for only $20. Oh well, at least it isn’t $3.00 per gallon.

Food ($600) - I could clip coupons but that has never really been my thing. I would either leave them on the kitchen counter top at home or in the car. Most of the really good coupons in the Sunday paper are for items I would not normally buy so this does not save me money. I think $600 to feed a family of four with two teenagers is pretty decent.

Well, this is my plan to attack the bills. Are your bills getting the best of you? What do you do to keep them under control?

Grocery Shopping

When our local grocery store installed the first two Self-check cash registers I was impressed. I thought how techno savvy the grocery store was getting. I could not wait to gather all my groceries and try out the new “toy”. Most items scanned very nicely but produce and anything in a bag. Well, the scanner had trouble picking up the bar codes. This was frustrating and I could only imagine the teenage cashiers were giggling to themselves “See, we are not the problem. You are having the same issue we have.” Not only was I having difficulty scanning but I had to be in front of the scanner and the end of the belt all at once to keep the “flow” of products moving. Yes, now you too can get frustrated with the scanner and bag your own groceries. If I have a large quantity of groceries I opt for the register with a real person, usually a teenager.

Due to past experiences with unruly bagging at manned registers I place my items on the small conveyor belt with deliberate purpose. First to go on the belt are all frozen foods then cold food, items that go in the upper cabinets of my kitchen then the items for the lower cabinets. Why so particular? When the items are all bagged they are replaced in my cart in this order(front to back of cart). This allows me to reverse the order (back to front of cart) when I reach my car and pack them in the trunk. When I am home the bags closest to me are frozen and cold foods which need to be placed in the freezer and refrigerator, thus need to come out first. The last bags to come out are those with the items which belong in the lower cabinets. While I place the items in the upper cabinets my children can easily put away the items that belong in the lower cabinet. This may sound a bit over the top to plan in such a way but it really works for us. When you are a single working mom every extra moment have to playing and just hanging out with my children is a blessing.

I miss the days of grocery shopping when the older man (30s-40s) would quickly punch in all the codes for each item and another carefully bagged each item for me with a warm friendly smile. Ah, the good old days.

Crafty Day

Monday, Memorial Day,

(will write about Sunday later…power outage lost file)

Since we are away from relatives, over coming my fears of actually having a car payment rather than paying cash and basically doing Memorial Day weekend on our own we dive into to crafts. ManSon and Oldest Daughter are off with friends. Snow White and I brave the shopping strips expecting them to be closed due to the holiday. To our surprise all stores are open! We rush into AC More and fill up our cart with much needed items to create a wonderful end of year thank you gift from Snow White to her teacher. A gift card to the local Olive Garden would have sufficed but a crafty gift from the heart seems more personal. I thought the projects would take up most of the day but turns out Snow White has become a wiz at crafts. Quick drying paint was also a culprit in her finishing so quickly.

First on Snow White’s agenda… the Box. She picked out a good sized hinged box. I picked out a clay flower pot. We made our way through the isles picking out things she liked such as stickers of puppies and flowers and other miscellaneous things from the scrap booking sections. Then we made our way to the paint area. I asked Snow White what she wanted to make of the box and flower pot. The flower pot would be for flowers on teacher’s desk and the box would be for whatnots she has no drawers for. Still the paint selections were a bit fuzzy to me at the time but I knew they would make a nice addition to our craft paint selection at home. One final item was a turtle she saw hanging on to a pottery planter.

After our little crafters extrusion we decided to go out for dinner. Snow White requested a restaurant we had seen on our way to the craft store, Cheese Burger in Paradise. We have a few rules for dining out. You should pick a restaurant you have not tried and a dish you never had before. Apparently she loves gumbo and Cheese Burger in Paradise. She could not stop saying the word paradise. This place looks like paradise, the food is like a tropical island of paradise, Madagascar movie Paradise was reveled when the lion liked sushi and it was under an umbrella just like this! Look at my fruit! Paradise fruit! This is paradise! Our table of the ocean and land is paradise.

When we were home we laid out all of our new supplies. I am very proud of her creativity. I have to say even as an adult there were moments I thought “Wait! Let Mommy help you!” but she had more confidence in herself than I had realized. I let her do her own thing and then waited on the side lines to fix it. I came to the realization, she knows what she wants to do and she can achieve it! She did let me pain the flower pot and put the flower stems in. That was all. One thing I really wanted to do was paint over the blue drip on the front of the box. Okay, maybe you have to look hard to see it…bottom corner of the box. She would not let me. They are her projects and I no choice but to let her do them as she likes. She is 8 years old after all.

Garden of Knowlege

Teacher's Box


Since Snow White was afraid her precious gifts would be distroyed on the school bus I brought them to her class during my lunch hour. The teacher was thrilled! After all the students had a chance to see them up close she put the flowers on her desk and took the box home to use as a jewelry box.