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Archive for October, 2015

Evil Kitty

October 26th, 2015 at 11:19 pm

So, my cat has pulled a Darth Vader and well, gone to the dark side. She is no longer the happy cat. She's let jealousy and spite get the best of her...the dark side. With this dark side, she has decided to pee in the corner of the room where we like to use the computer. We are now spending money on various carpet treatments (it's starting to add up). I am now contemplating getting the special pet vacuum, which was not in the budget, but we cannot keep going to the grocery store to get a rental one. Also, we will have to most likely get another car until we can afford it. ughhh. That means saving, searching, and also paying for the registration fee. Anyway, the plus side is that we got "get $300" in the mail this week, so that rocksSmile if we open a checking account with a different bank. I think we will do that. I'm thinking the free $300 would at least pay for the special vacuum cleaner.

Hooray to paying bills on time!

October 23rd, 2015 at 09:38 pm

I know that most would not get excited about paying the bills on time and that many do, but it has really taken a while for us to get things together in terms of how much/when they come in-are due/and making sure we have enough money to pay them, especially with kids and "unexpected" situations like fixing the car. Not to mention, I used to have a fear/procrastination of paying them, but now it is the fear of fees/adding up/not getting out of the hamster wheel (it took a lot of pain and mistakes to get here) This month we have successfully paid on time and continued to have money in the emergency fund, despite taking out a huge chunk for car fixing. We still have to pay a hospital bill, one last credit card (which was opened in an emergency to fix car last year) We got paid this week so I replenished the emergency account, which feels good, but we will have to keep it super frugal for a very long time since we are fixing the car still(hopefully the last major visit). Although the car situation is not fun, I spoke with a friend who let me know that their new 3 year old car not only has monthly car payments, but they have to pay the things that are starting to go wrong on it now. they are paying $350 a month on their car payment! However,we are trying to figure out...do we continue to pay for fixing this car or buy another one?

Move out Murphy!

October 19th, 2015 at 04:21 pm

So, the unwanted guest Murphy (of Murphy's Law) keeps trying to stick around or knock at our door...this following telling yucky family members to never call again. Yup,for the past 3 weeks, we have had to take the car to the mechanic, a good $300 plus per visit.This definitely hinders the getting another car for the husband to get to work now (which is needed). Then the cat decided to be spiteful (probably stressed with the new baby) and peed in the corner of our living room...on the carpet and we spent $47 to rent a carpet cleaner/formula to get it out. (we had to take a part our desk to get to it.
However, we are not backing down and continue to truck through! We are not in the red with our checking account, which happened for 1.5 months when we moved. We have paid the bills on time and I've been watching each dollar like a hawk for the automatic bill pay. Despite Murphy, we still have money in our emergency fund, which we took out some for the car. The plus is that we get paid this week! My husband has also been trying out the public transit system (bus/train/etc) to save on gas since we were dropping him off, which was tiresome for everyone and wasted more gas.
So, aside from being persistent to keep Murphy at bay, I found that another way to keep him out is being grateful for what is going well! I'm grateful that we are being persistent with our finances on one salary, homeschooling is going pretty well and glad I can spend time with my children, we carved pumpkins yesterday and I made pumpkin soup (which everyone liked) and today we will roast pumpkin seeds as a snack. I'm also looking up Cioppino soup recipes since the weather is cooling off(if anyone has any, send them my way since I've never tried) for the end of the week. Yummy! Plus, I have not spent money on anything we haven't needed. In fact, we have been donating and shedding things we don't need, which feels nice too.

Life and Homeschool journey!

October 3rd, 2015 at 04:56 am

So, last year I contemplated homeschooling because I was so appalled by the public school system...after volunteering to make sure the kids were safe and to have the staff know/have extra eyes on my kids, it was tough to see because the teachers were really wonderful (and overworked to the max). Yes, even the ones in "good" districts are going by the same type of system...common core AKA the one size fits all learning...whatever it takes to get the kids to pass the tests. Seriously, the 1 to 30 teacher to student ratio is unacceptable and what's even funnier is that they fudge their numbers. If you look up their records/scores etc, they'll say 1 to 22 or 1 to 25. What B.S! So I was torn because it wasn't the teachers lack of effort, love for the children, or inspiration, this is what I saw, it is the system set up so horribly wrong for the teachers and the students. The teachers were amazing, but they were not allotted the tools to really help their students and free up styles to get them to learn.
So, I decided to homeschool/kinda. I'm going through a charter school. I had no idea that although they still have to pass certain standards, testing doesn't start until 3rd grade, where public schools are now starting to test at kindergartenFrown
Anyway, they give a huge stipend (yup, they allow you to choose what they call "vendors" to teach your kid...swimming, karate, art, reading,music etc paid for with their huge list of people that support their charter school.) So, knowing I'd have another kid and not liking what I saw in public school, I decided to try this...and well, I'm liking it along with my children because learning is really cool. They are taking lessons that I'd never be able to afford 2 children and I'm able to alter what they are supposed to learn tailored to them. Wow. what a journey!
Also, today rocked, I received almost $150 refund from amazon that was an old closed account from years back! (I won't get too excited, it's going toward billsSmile