Dr Copa

I don’t know about you, but Debt Reduction is a hot topic in our household lately!  My wife has been talking for a long time about how we need to be more careful with how we spend our money.  She’s the bookkeeper of the family, and she has gotten quite concerned about the state of our finances.  She’s been looking for a good paying full time job for a while now, and has only managed to find part time work.  So she’s really been pushing hard for us to pinch every penny as hard as we can.

I’ve found some really great articles on managing and saving money and handling debt on the reducedebt.net website.  I’m going to encourage everyone in my family to read them and see if they can apply any of the advice to what they do to help us save money.

I was so happy to see the warmer weather today! My sister-in-law needed me to do a little bit of work on her car, so it was good timing. A friend came over to help me out; she needed hinges welded onto her car door – they had broken off. It took quite a while to do it, but we got it done and fixed a few more things on it. The thermometer said it was only 50 degrees out, but working out in the driveway in the sun he felt much warmer than that. It was good to get outside in that kind of warmer air and tinker with a car! That is something I really love to do!

It seems that every time I turn around, my wife is on the computer, using some form of online bill pay to authorize the payment of a bill that has come in the mail. She tells me that when the bill comes in the mail she goes on line immediately and authorizes the payment to be made by the due date, and then she files the bill in the “paid bills” part of the filing cabinet.

I asked her why she pays them before they are due – why not wait until the due date? She explained that when she authorizes the payment, there is a field she populates with the date that she wants it to be paid; it does not automatically get paid immediately. So the money stays in our checking account until close to the due date, and she doesn’t have to worry about a late payment!

I think that’s pretty smart!  Plus paying online saves us the expense of buying checks, envelopes, and postage!  And online bill pay (so far) is a free service.  I hope it stays free!

Even before we moved into this house, we’ve had friends and relatives trying to talk us into getting Direct TV service for our television services.  I’m pretty sure that the reason they were doing that was because their DirectSatTV provider was offering them a rebate of some kind to help bring in new customers.  Seems to me that every time the conversation turns to Directv and they are singing the praises of their package that they ask me to mention their names if we decide to switch over from cable.

Every time I’ve looked into switching, I find that I am getting the best value with the provider that I have.  I don’t need all of the bells and whistles, and I don’t care for the limitation of only 4 televisions per account!  We have six televisions!

With the last batch of Angel Food Ministries food that we got last month, there were some items included that require to be deep fat fried.  Neither my wife nor myself have ever deep fat fried anything in our lives!  Can you believe that?  My wife says she remembers that her step-mother used to deep fat fry things in her big pot, but didn’t remember how to do it. 

Well, we couldn’t decide what to do with this particular item of food.  We considered trying to give it away, or trying to cook it some other method, or just throw it away.  Finally my wife came to the conclusion that chances are pretty good that if we continue to buy food from the Angel Food Ministries that we will probably get more food that needs to be deep fat fried.  So we decided to buy ourselves an official deep fat fryer last weekend at the store.  Now we just have to learn how to use it!  One more gadget to figure out how to use, and where to store when not in use!  Oh well, I hope it’s worth it!