Out of Debt Again

Cathy from Chief Family Officer commented to my Thank You Notes and Dollar Stores post and suggested that the most economical solution would be to make my own thank you notes.

Of course, that is brilliant! I love doing creative type things, and even though I don’t have lots of time to spend on artsy-craftsy stuff, I could put together fifty or so at one time and not have to worry about making more for a while.

I just happened a couple of weeks ago to find Rubber Stamp Champ, an online site that makes custom stamps and right now they are having a “Knockout Price” on their Ideal 50 Self-Inking stamp.  The cost is $6.25 per stamp, and free shipping for orders over $10.

I ordered a stamp with the company name and address for envelopes, and a stamp with the company name, Mr. A’s name and phone number, for Mr. A’s receipt book.  They arrived within a week of ordering. I am very pleased with their product. These stamps would also be great to use as endorsement/deposit stamps.

They make a lot of other kinds of stamps, and maybe I’ll have one customized with the company logo for the thank you cards.

Thanks for the inspiration, Cathy!

Mrs. Accountability

Now you might not think that’s so exciting, but we cook a lot of our meals from scratch around here, and we use fresh garlic quite regularly.  I’d say no less than 3 times a week and sometimes daily.

Back in 1999 I was having a lot of trouble keeping a garlic press around. They kept breaking. The plastic parts would break or even the metal parts would break. I was buying a new garlic press every 6 months or so. Then I asked some friends on an online list.  A couple of them raved about their Zyliss Susi Garlic Press. It was pretty expensive for me back then, but I took their advice and bought one. I didn’t know at the time I was actually making an investment in a great product that would end up lasting over a decade! Amazingly, the price has stayed the same, it still costs $14.99 - so my cost each year has been $1.50!

And happily, I’m still using my garlic press, it still works perfectly. You can even toss the whole unpeeled clove into this baby and it works great.  Actually that’s the easiest way to use it, because when you pull the skin out of the press it removes nearly all the garlic fibers that are left behind and you just have to rinse and it’s clean.

Last night we had chicken taco salad for dinner. I used my trusty garlic press to make the salsa, and the ranch dressing. Have I ever shared my homemade ranch dressing with you? I don’t think I have.  Well, it’s about high time I did. It’s much more economical than buying the package mix, it doesn’t contain any unpronounceable ingredients, and best of all, no MSG.

Homemade Ranch Dressing

1/2 cup mayonnaise
1 cup plain yogurt
1 clove garlic, crushed
1 teaspoon granulated onion powder
1 teaspoon dried parsley flakes
pinch of paprika
salt and pepper to taste

For best results, mix the ingredients together about an hour before using so the parsley flakes have time to soften.

You can also use buttermilk or sour cream instead of yogurt. It’s so easy to have all these ingredients on hand that I can make ranch dressing any time I want.

I’m still on the hunt for a can opener that will last for a decade or longer. I used to buy the Swing-a-Way brand, but even those are now poor quality. We bought a Kitchen-Aid can opener, but it lasted less than six months. I thought Kitchen-Aid was supposed to be high quality, but unfortunately that wasn’t our experience.

Well, now you know what garlic press to invest in.

Have a lovely day!

Mrs. Accountability

Just a quick update - sorry I’ve been missing in action.  The last week has been a whirlwind for my boss and I, as our agency runs on a fiscal year.  Yesterday was the last day and we spent it wracking our brains to make sure we got all the checks typed, the postage meter read, everyone’s expense reports, etc.  Today starts a new year. I’m still trying to get all of the manual accounting into our electronic system, I am getting closer and closer, but it’s still pretty hectic.

On the home front, as usual I’ve been busy with Mr. A’s business, and other things. We completed our last pickup for the side job we quit last month, on Friday. Over the weekend I designed a new logo for Mr. A’s business and we’re ordering more shirts, and this time baseball hats.  We’re also looking into whether we should combine his businesses, or keep them separate as they are now. It would be a lot simpler bookkeeping-wise right now, but we are looking to the future when if things work out as we hope we will be able to sell his one business.  He’s building a very nice client base, and we are starting to advertise more heavily in the cities nearest to where we live.  He’s still not making a ton of money, but things are looking good.  We’re also looking into making his business into an LLC.   I’ve contacted the local SCORE for advice and am still looking for an accountant that can give me financial advice for Quicken.

Financially on the home front we’re getting by - we’ve made a little dent in the debt and my 0% interest cards are nearing the end and will soon have interest rates so I need to start finding cards to transfer the amounts onto.

Our mortgage went up by a couple of dollars, we had an escrow shortage of $142, which we paid, but the amount still increased.  That’s okay, it’s only gone up to $514.

No car repairs in June, whew.  After the whoppers in April and May, we deserve a break. Thank you old vehicles for staying in shape.

We’ve been invited to a July 3rd party and are planning to attend. I’m planning to bring a bunch of eggplant that we can grill and the hosts have a swimming pool and then we’ll all go to see fireworks in their community park. Should be fun.

What are your plans for the 4th?

Mrs. Accountability

So it happened to my boss again. Late fees for unpaid bills.

I recently signed her up at Amazon - and they offered her a $30 discount if she signed up for a card. She agreed to sign up for the card. About a week ago she came to me and asked if I could check somehow and see why she hadn’t gotten a bill for the Amazon credit card. I went online and we discovered she had incurred a $15 late fee.

She had me make a payment online and said she’d worry about the $15 late fee later.

Then a few days later she told me that a bundle of mail had showed up in her box after the mailman had already delivered mail earlier in the morning. In the bundle of mail, along with the Amazon bill, she found several more credit card bills that had not been paid, so she had late fees on all of them! What a bummer!

She believes what happened is one of the neighbor children likes to check the mail and she thinks he might have come over to her house and checked her mail and then the parents never found her mail until a couple weeks later. They didn’t even have the decency to bring it to her in person, they just slipped it into the mailbox.

So now she has a bunch of late fees on several credit cards.

Again I was astonished because while I am not perfect, I keep a list of what bills are due when and I go through that list every payday and check off what has been paid, and how much was paid.   I am now even more convinced that it is important and necessary to keep a list of bills and to not depend on the postal delivery service to alert me to what bill is now due.

She is extremely organized, and would never lose a bill, but it seems foolhardy to not have a list of bills and when they are due, especially since this has now happened to her twice!

I use Excel to keep track of my bills. I am paid twice a month. I have my bills set up to pay most of them on the first paycheck, then the rest on the second paycheck. I pay most of them online, and many are automatic payments.

Every payday I copy the previous time period to the bottom of the workbook and repopulate the cells with the correct information. For example, I enter the amount in the bank accounts and make sure all the amounts due are filled in. Here is a screenshot:

I know by looking at my spreadsheet that all the credit cards are due, Mr. A’s medical insurance is due, etc.  At a glance I can see everything that needs to be paid this payday.

As I go down the list, I bold the item amounts that have been paid, delete the amount due from the right column, and enter the new checking account balance. In the example below, I’ve paid all the credit cards which amounts to $865.00. This reduces the checking account by $865, so I enter the new amount there.

Then I make a payment directly to the Amazon Personal card for the amounts we have budgeted for gasoline and food and Mr. A’s allowance, $770.00.

Then I go through and list all the auto payments into Quicken, and write checks for the remaining items. Now as you can see the checking accounts are way down to almost nothing, and the right hand column shows no amounts owed. All amounts are bold, indicating they are all paid.

Two weeks from now I’ll start all over again. Copy and paste these rows at the bottom of the spreadsheet, fill the right column by dragging the top formula, and enter the amounts in the checking accounts.

I’ve been using this spreadsheet since 2002 in combination with Quicken.  As long as I sit down every two weeks and work out what is due and pay bills, I can rest easy that everything has been paid.

Do you use Excel to help track your bills?  What method do you find to work the best?

Mrs. Accountability

One of the things I’ve been striving to do is to send thank you notes to Mr. A’s customers.  I try to watch for them on clearance at the store, and as long as they are blank inside I’ll buy just about any design.  Well, within reason. I can’t buy anything too feminine looking for a man to send out as a thank you to customers.

I haven’t found any on clearance lately, and set out looking on the Internet so see if I could find a good deal.  The cheapest I could find were twenty cents each.  That’s expensive compared to the clearance deals I’d found in the past. Especially when I added in the cost for shipping! That nearly doubled the cost.

So I decided to try a dollar store on the way home from work. I am picky about the dollar stores I’ll shop as some of them are of the “99 cent only” variety, while others are multiples of dollars.  Those “dollar stores” rarely have good prices.

My favorite dollar stores are “99 cent only” and they usually have cards two for a dollar.  It took me a while of looking but I finally found their blank note cards.  They were $1.00 for a pack of eight cards and envelopes.  With tax they end up being $1.08. The final cost ends up being thirteen and a half cents each. That’s not too bad.

I also purchase the Liberty Bell Forever stamps which are really quite lovely for people who actually use stamps, especially since the cost of stamps seems to go up so very often nowadays.

One of my coworkers found a place online where you can order a thank you card and have it customized with your own message. She sent one to me, the thing I liked the least about it was the font used to address the envelope. You know how nowadays junk mail comes in an envelope with what looks to be a handwritten address?  But it’s really just a font that looks like someone scratched out your name?  That’s how the envelope was addressed from the online card company she used.  It just didn’t look real.

One of Mr. A’s acquaintances is fierce with jealousy due to the fact that I help Mr. A with his business.  His wife works a regular job, like me, but she doesn’t do anything at all to help him with his business. He always makes comments to Mr. A like, “That’s nice. I don’t have a secretary.” I like that he fusses about it, because it makes Mr. A realize how much work I do for him. For someone like Mr. Fierce, this custom card company might be an option.  I couldn’t find the one my coworker used, but I wouldn’t be comfortable using this company.  At the time of this writing, they had a “thank you for your business” card, with the following sample “inside verse”: We appreciate your business and the confidence that you have placed with us. Please conyacy to us whenever we can be of further service”.  I believe they mean that word to be “contact”.  I don’t know, it just really hurts my confidence in using this particular company.

The best deal I ever got for blank thank you cards was a clearance deal from Joann’s. They were blank white cards from the bridal section. There were 50 cards and envelopes in the pack, regularly $9.99 but marked down to 99 cents!  So I paid a whopping two cents each for those note cards. I still have some of them but I really like the idea of using a note card that’s a little more cheery. I suppose I could haul out Big A’s watercolor paints and paint a pretty design on the front.

Do you send out thank you notes of any kind?  What’s the best deal you’ve found?

Mrs. Accountability

• 11 Lavender Touch Eggplant 2#12oz
• 3 Scalloped Squash plus four unpollinated baby squash 1#11oz
• 7 Pickling cukes 1#8oz
• 2 regular cukes 12 oz
• 3 Tomatoes 9 oz
• 4 zucchini squash 3#1.4oz
• 1 Yellow Crookneck squash 4.4oz
• 14 Raveena Eggplant 1#9oz

For breakfast I cut up two eggplants I had from last weekend’s harvest, a small crookneck squash, 3 tomatoes (1 leftover from slicing last night for hamburgers, two with ugly scars that were perfectly delicious, even though ugly) and steamed until tender. I bought my mom some shirataki noodles for Mother’s Day which turned out to be a huge flop since she hated them.  She gave me the entire box, and I decided today would finally be the day I tried them. I was surprised that I actually liked them.

I’m planning to make Pork-Stuffed Eggplant tonight using some of the Lavender Touch eggplant. They only grow to be about 1/3 the size of a regular Black Beauty eggplant but they sure are delicious.

I should get some pricing on what vegetables are going for in the grocery store right now so I can calculate how much money I would have spent had I bought what I harvested from the garden today.

I hope you are having a lovely day!

Mrs. Accountability

When I made our batch of laundry soap, we just bought our Fels-Naptha from Walmart. My boss’ daughter told her about the recipe and my boss told her best friend, who wants to make up a batch for all six of her grown children. So she’s been on the hunt for Fels-Naptha. She can’t find it anywhere, so my boss asked me if I could pick up six bars for her friend. Only now WE can’t find it. We’ve checked several Walmarts and other stores, and can’t seem to find it out there.

So I went hunting online today. I found it at Amazon for <gasp!> $4.99 per 5.5 ounce bar!!

Then I found it at another place for $1.29 bar, but over $10 shipping and handling for the six bars.

Finally, I found it at this little company Soaps Gone Buy that has Fels-Naptha bars on sale right now for 99 cents a bar. And you can order up to 7 bars of soap and have it shipped for $4.95 (within the lower 48 states in the US).

Unfortunately, Mr. A decided that the homemade soap I made was eating his jeans so he doesn’t want to use it anymore.  He’s been buying other liquid detergents and I got lazy and have been using whatever is sitting on the shelf. I should get back to using my own inexpensive homemade laundry soap again.

Mrs. Accountability

The Accountability Family recently went to one of the small towns near where we live. Mr. A has a client that just bought a fixer-upper home for $40,000.  I went along with my camera to take photos of the place.

We needed to kill a little bit of time, so we stopped at Savers just to have a look around.  Their prices are high at this particular one, I prefer to shop the Savers in the big city since they tend to be less expensive.  One of the things I’ve been watching out for has been queen fitted sheets for my bed.  They are $4.99 per sheet, unless they have the right color tag. You know, the tag of the day, which takes 50% off the price.

I’ve been getting by with one sheet, and it’s starting to get threadbare. It’s already ripped in two spots, and I’ve sewed it back together.  It’s still perfectly useable, but I’ve been wanting a spare so that I can wash one and put the clean one right back on the bed instead of having to wait for it to wash and dry.

I found two queen fitted sheets, and then I went looking for new pillowcases to go with my “new” sheets. Pillowcases are $0.99 for each pair.

I’ve never been a big fan of fancy bedding. I don’t use the fitted sheets, ever. But I do love my fluffy comforter.

I’m set for another few years for bedding for a whopping $6.97 plus tax.

Mrs. Accountability

So back in September, I signed up for the TrueEarnings Card from Costco and American Express.  I found the offer from Madison at My Dollar Plan. I was supposed to get a $25 statement credit soon after.  On February 11th, I called to find out why I never got my $25 statement credit, and was told it takes up to 12 weeks to see this offer, and it should show up anytime. I called again on March 3rd and was told it would be 10-12 weeks from my FIRST purchase and I should see the credit by the first week of April.

Well, here it is the second week of June, and yes, I’m way behind on checking up on this, but I still haven’t seen the statement credit!

So I called AMEX today and talked with a very pleasant and helpful man named Bob, who told me he couldn’t find any offers like this from back in September. He asked me if I had the offer number available. I didn’t. But I did go to Madison’s site and started reading some of the offer and when I said TrueEarnings he was able to start looking for that and finally found the offer.

He said he was very glad I’d called because I definitely was eligible for the $25 statement credit, and he would open up a case so they could find out why I haven’t received my credit.  He didn’t say how long this investigation would take…

Sheesh! I don’t think I’ll be opening any more credit cards just to get $25 back! Too much work!

Mrs. Accountability

I just recently learned that Costco offers car rentals, and not only that but travel options, like vacation packages, hotels, cruises. Amazing.

Right now Costco is offering a 50% weekend rental rates.   I will be doing a bit of traveling and I’ll need to drive. I’m a little bit concerned about my vehicle making the trip, plus unfortunately my air conditioning is working intermittently. So I am looking into the option of renting a vehicle. When I got my first email from Costco about their auto rentals, they were offering a special for only $10 a day!  That of course was for an economy sized vehicle.

This will be a “working” vacation, and I’ll be splitting the costs with another person. We won’t be able to use an economy, as my traveling partner is tall and portly.  It is looking like we can expect to pay at least $250 for a week with unlimited mileage - this is looking at other companies and checking my options through AAA.  Ironically, as I’m doing this research, the Costco Travel site is down and has been for the last 30 minutes. I will check back later to make sure they can’t give me a better deal than what I’m finding elsewhere.

Have you ever used Costco Travel?  Do you ever need to rent a vehicle? Who do you prefer to use? Any tips for renting cars?

Mrs. Accountability