Category: Money and finances


Thank goodness my kids have finished their college education and we no longer have to search for financial aid information to get them to have enough money to sig up for their college courses. It was becoming extremely difficult to get the help we needed for one of my sons that struggled with his grades. But now we are in the stage of repaying his student loans, which is another challenge on it’s own right.

When I was talking with Madeline about how we had to search far and wide for the financial aid, she was telling me that she had heard that her son might qualify for a scholarship for left handed students. I had never heard of any scholarships based on something like that! What will they think of next!

With all of the seasonal shopping for the Holidays taken care of, it is time to get back to the business of the daily grind. I was upset to discover that I had made a mistake in balancing my checkbook and accidentally bounced a check last week. I found out when the bank sent me a notice in the mail.

The biggest reason that upset me was I was in the middle of trying to figure out how to fix credit reports that I had received recently and had been trying to follow the advice that I have been reading about how to clean up your credit score I know how important it is to make sure that payments are made on time! And bouncing checks is NOT going to help me fix my credit!

Did you ever wonder how it works out that when you use a search engine to find a product or service, how the order of presentation is determined? Well, it turns out there is a whole behind the scenes process called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that determines that. And there is a big money business behind that process!

A business that wants to be one of the top companies listed for a search like that certainly has its work cut out for it! Some of the most technologically savvy businesses would be quick to obtain guaranteed seo services with a company whose sole business is making sure that their client’s web page is near the top of the search. Doing that maximizes the efficiency of the effort; hiring a professional that guarantees results seems to me to be a no-brainer. Why waste valuable time re-inventing the wheel?

Today my hubby and I went to the local warehouse club to pick up a few things. A pair of spiky shoe cleats for my son (he walks to work) for a Christmas present, a pumpkin pie and an apple pie. The size of the pies and cakes at the warehouse club are HUGE and the prices are quite small, compared to the prices at the regular grocery store that we do our weekly shopping at. If there was a warehouse club store nearer to our house we would shop there more often; we could save a lot of money. The price of milk was amazingly low. And much to my surprise the store is now carrying my favorite breakfast cereal – Multi-grain Cheerios! I bought two boxes of those.

Perhaps we should take a hard look at working in a once-a-month trip there to stock up on some of the items.

The cost of ink cartridges has always been an issue in this house hold. I really want to start looking for another printer that will not cost me hundreds of dollars each year to keep the Black and White Copies and the Color Copies affordable to print. I do shop around for the best deals that I can find off and online, but even with all of that effort I still pay way too much each time. I have turned into a real printer scrooge these past six months or so and I’m so tired of it. And God forbid if some one wants to do some type of flyer printing for various needs and wants, I find myself getting anxious about the whole darn thing.

My sister just purchased a new printer and she is only having to pay $5 for her black ink cartridge, so I’ve got to go over there and take a look at it and see what type it is, how much it cost her and see if that would be do able for me. Hopefully I’ll be getting some gift cards as Christmas presents, since so many more folks are turning to gift cards for their gift giving needs. And I can’t think of anything better to use them on then a more cost effective printer, because I really do use my printer for a lot of various printing, faxing and copying tasks. Five bucks every couple of months versus the thirty five dollars that I’m easily dishing out would be a welcomed change.

I know that her color ink cartridges cost more than $5, but when I need copies immediately, I need them immediately, you know what I mean? If the printing job needs to be a professional one and can wait a couple of days, then I’ll take the job to Super Fine Printing and let them do the work for me; let them do their magic and use their ink and paper and wear and tear on their commercial printers.