Posts Tagged ‘Money’

Skimping & Saving

Thursday, April 10th, 2008

With a very small balance in my bank account I’ve been taking my limited resources and still managing to maintain a clean environment.  I’m to the point where I’m low on supplies such as bleach, toilet bowl cleaners, sponges, detergent, fabric softener and other basic supplies.  So what do you do?  Go to Walmart and hope to bring home the cheapest items on the shelf just to get the job done?  NO! – You go to the local Dollar Tree and pick up all of your supplies for $1 a piece.  The reason I love this store is everything is actually a dollar.  It’s not like the $0.99 cent stores that you walk into where the only thing that’s $0.99 is a piece of candy.  No, you can pick up everything from cleaning supplies to school supplies and purchase these items in bulk for the wonderful price of $1 OR 10 for $1.  That’s $0.10c a piece, how could you NOT love that?

So in order for me to completely clean the house all week long it’s costing me exactly $10 every two weeks.  Every other Monday I head down and pick up some bleach, sponges (10pk), laundry detergent, fabric softener sheets (50 pack), toilet drop-ins, air freshener spray, the air freshener gel and maybe a candle or two just to keep things smelling clean and fresh.  Let’s not forget the ever-so-important paper towels and tissues.  So yes, it’s shopping on a budget that’s keeping me up to speed on cleaning the house without breaking the bank.

My only issue is with the toilet drop-ins.  They aren’t the name brand, you lift the lid off the back of the bowl and drop in the little blue disk.  Unfortunately it doesn’t hold up as well as they’re supposed to and the one I recently purchased wound up exploding in the bowl.  Not to the point that it like blew pieces all over the place, it just happened to break down in huge chunks instead of slowly getting smaller and the turn out is bits and pieces of this blue solution shooting out whenever you flush the toilet.  There are sections of blue that are now so stuck that I can’t even get to them to remove them so we’ve been flushing the toilet a little bit more just to loosen things up.  I figure if I throw another one in there it’ll move things along and hopefully put things back in less – odd – order.  The one in there is still doing it’s job properly, I still clean the bowl every three days, it’s just a pain in the butt having to get myself in there to try to dig out the piece that’s still causing all of the trouble – you know?

Eventually it will completely dissolve and I’ll be able to finally get rid of the ugly blue section that it’s leaving but for now it’s no big deal.

Road Trip!

Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

NFRSean and I have set many goals for our relationship, so many that we’re probably going to need to win the lottery in order to achieve them all. Our biggest goal is to travel across the USA, making it a point to stop in every single state before returning home. We admit that it’s going to be a long trip, probably taking a few months to complete, but if we’re financially stable enough to accomplish it, then that’s the route we’re going to take. I’m still hoping to win that $46 Million PowerBALL Jackpot but I doubt that will ever happen. If it did happen, I already know exactly where I’d like to purchase property to build a custom home on. I also know I’m going to be spending some money on a fully loaded RV, how else am I going to travel the USA?

We’ll start by going South through Maryland and Virginia, eventually making it to Florida. We’ll then head towards Texas because I’ve always loved the idea of visiting there. I may even look into picking up National Rodeo Finals tickets because you can’t get more Texas than that!

From Texas we’ll work our way around to Arizona so I can visit Jackie for a couple of days and then we’ll take the trip to Vegas because I know for sure I’ve got free rooms at Harrah’s and Ceaser’s so that’s definitely worth the trip! After that we’ll work our way to both Northern and Southern California, we have friends and family to visit there. We’ll then take the “high route” through the mountains and head home. We’ll basically be weaving through everything but I’m certain we’ll get a lot of great scenery loaded into our digital cameras, and we’re making it a point to visit all of the best local shops. I’m not going to travel the US to live off fast food, I want to go where the locals go. I also want to know what’s so great about Chicago Pizza. I’m a New York girl, nothing can compare!

So yes, I’m going to travel the US with Sean and Bella, maybe even a second dog depending on the size of the RV and my ability to walk into a shelter and only walk out with ONE dog. That may be hard to accomplish, but I’ll do it.

Now, I just need to win the lotto, don’t I?

Lawsuits don’t stick

Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

While I hate the idea of a lawsuit, I know that sometimes they’re very important. A few years ago my a family member of mine went in for surgery on both of their ankles. She’d had trouble walking for many, many years and when things got to be too much to handle she decided to have something done about it. The surgeon was a little full of himself and instead of paying close attention to important details, he kind of went quick with it and managed to cut a nerve or two and did nothing to repair them. A lawsuit was filed when a nurse filled in my family member about what’d happened. There was a huge uproar in the surgical room in regards to this. He, being a jerk, really didn’t care and quickly sewed the nerves back together, the problem is now they don’t function properly and are causing a lot of problems.

A lawsuit was filed against him but since he was supposedly the top surgeon in the hospital, they were the ones responsible for flipping the bill. In order to protect a reputation they continued a long drawn out process of prolonging all of the paperwork and went through numerous other legal loopholes that they jumped through. By the time anything was brought to court, the doctor had no recolection of anything happening, this was a good four years after the fact, and the judge decided that nothing could be done. Nevermind the fact that someone is now incapable of walking due to his botch-job!

She wasn’t suing for millions of dollars, she wanted the cost of rehabilitation and medical bills to be covered, and possibly some pain and suffering thrown into that. It was only a $200,000 lawsuit, considering $140,000 went to medical bills I think asking for $60,000 for pain and suffering, from a multi-million dollar hospital is fairly reasonable. She knew that if she won the case she’d have to deal with a yearly payment as opposed to the full amount so she was looking into different corporations to help her to receive a Structured Settlement.

The point of Structured Settlements is to receive a lump sum of cash for your payments towards paying off credit cards and other bills, eliminating debt and reducing your medical bills. So if she were actually lucky enough to win the case, and not be robbed of her basic freedoms – such as the ability to walk – she could have easily fixed all of her money problems.

I hate law, I really do.