Home and Garden Diva

You are here: Home / Archives for Home and family / Managing the bills

Everything is on sale at this time of year isn’t it?

by

I don’t know about you, but half the emails I’m getting are for post holiday sales. Always at this time of year the stores have huge sales – everything is 50% or more off or stores are having liquidation sales and everything must go. Am I right?

Are you getting all those emails too? Or flyers in your door?

Now I don’t have much money these days to take advantage of the sales, but I’m keep an eye on them anyway. I figure that I might see something that someone else might be interested in and I was right. I saw an ad for kelty tents at RockyMountainTrail.com for really good prices and I sent the ad to my nephew because I know he’s been looking into getting some camping gear. I don’t know if he’ll take advantage of the sale or not, but at least he knows about a great sale now.

Do you take advantage of some of the great sales at this time of year too?

My husbands hours keep changing at work

by

My husbands workplace is really messing up his schedule. One of his co-workers was going to go back to school so they hired a new employee and shortly after the new guy was hired, but before he started the guy who’d said he was going to go back to school and had asked to cut down his hours said he wasn’t going back to school.

Unfortunately, by this time it was too late to “unhire” the new guy so my husband, Chris, the guy who was going back to school and then wasn’t and another guy all lost one shift per week to accommodate the new hire! So my husband went down from four shifts a week to three.

Now my husband is an attendant in the Recovery Room and he came up with an idea … he asked his boss if he could train in the Operating Room as they’re always short staffed there so over the last few weeks he’s been training one day a week there. Now this week the new guy started in the Recovery room and after the first day he couldn’t handle how busy it was and he’s going back to his old job in the hospital!

Unfortunately my husbands hours are still in jeopardy. The guy who was going to go back to school is going to go back in January and now another coworker wants to cut back his hours so they will still need to hire another worker … so my husband might be able to pick up more hours in the Operating Room now that he’s been trained there .. but he’s now thinking about starting over and going back to school too .. he’s noticed a demand in Physical Therapist Jobs so maybe going back to school for a career as a physical therapist.

We’re just hoping that over the next few months he gets enough hours for us to scrape by!

My husband needs a new job

by

I think it’s time for my husband to find a new job. He’s been working at the hospital for close to 10 years and he’s still in a part time position.

He’s worked in several jobs at the hospital. He first started when some cleaner jobs opened up and before long he went into portering and now he works in the Recovery Room. He loves what he does – it’s just that the position that he’s doing is only part time and there’s no full time opening available.

The other problem with his job is that our hospital has blown it’s budget over the last year so they’re making all the part time workers going on rotating temporary lay offs. In the last year my husband has been off work for a total of 6 weeks in temporary lay offs.

We’ve heard that they’re planning more lay offs for the summer so husband is starting to look for a new job outside the hospital. He really doesn’t want to leave his workplace because he really does enjoy his job, but we just can’t take the continued job insecurity and loss of income that the temporary layoffs cause.

Time to cut down on expenses

by

I’m scrambling to see where my husband and I can save money once again. My husband came home from work on Friday with the lovely news that he was going to be “temporarily” laid off work for the last two weeks of December.

That means he’ll have been laid off for a total of 6 weeks since last December.

Since I’m home on unpaid medical leave we really depend on my husbands income. We pretty much live pay check to pay check … so each time he goes through one of these one or two week lay offs it takes us about a month to recover, sometimes longer.

So … now I’m trying to find ways to save money on our bills and other expenses. I think we’re going to cut down to the bare minimum. Perhaps I’ll be searching around for insurance quotes again to see if we can cut down on what we’re paying for our house and car insurance too since even that went up this year.

No money yet our bills keep getting bigger

by

I’m so frustrated about money and bills right now. We’ve been having a tough year financially. There just isn’t enough money coming in, and it seems that every time we turn around something breaks down or needs to be fixed or replaced.

The latest in a long list of things to be replaced this year was the car. Our old car (it was 14 years old) died at the beginning of August and we bit the bullet and bought a used car to replace it. This of course is coming after we bought a new washing machine and dryer and a few kitchen appliances that had needed replacing earlier in the year.

Now we’re literally counting our pennies to pay the bills, buy groceries and of course to get my medications for my Crohns. One slip and we’ll be in terrible trouble. Actually I think we’re pretty much in terrible trouble right now – I’m just refusing to admit it.

Now I’ve just found out that our car insurance rates have gone up. I thought that they would be the same or be a little lower, especially since we have a newer – safer and I think more environmentally “correct” car. In fact that’s what our insurance company led us to believe when we were talking to them when we were transferring the insurance over from the old car to the new car.

Wrong … the bill is higher – at least for a few months anyway, until our new contract kicks in sometime in the new year (I think March) and then it will be a little lower, but it might not be lower than what it had been with the old car.

Our new car is a 4 door, 4 cylinder, sedan – should be fairly cheap to insure right? On top of that my husband and I have both been driving for over 25 years each -and we have PERFECT driving records. No accidents, no tickets, no driving infractions – nothing – ever. Our insurance company says they’re giving us a discount for our perfect driving records, but uhm … It really doesn’t feel like it.

Anyway … everything seems to be going up. We heat our house with oil and that’s gone up a bit this year, as has our electricity rates. Even our mortgage went up a little bit earlier today. So the budget I made a week ago needs to be reworked … to bad I haven’t figured out a way to add more money to our budget. LOL

I have a feeling we might be taking in a border in the next month or two if things keep going downhill.

Meta

Tags

basement bed bedroom clean cleaning clutter dog exercise family fitness flowers friends Furniture garden Health help home house husband ideas Kitchen laptop Lighting money Music neighborhood neighbors party plants room Shopping sick skin spring summer tips tired Toronto Travel tv Vacation walking warm winter work

Pages