Big Doins

Big doins around the Dreese house, a little too much excitement if you ask me. In the past week our basement has taken on water and our furnace stopped working. All of this while I wanted to work on the real project that is a complete gut and remodel of one of our spare bedrooms.

You are no doubt reading this and incredibly impressed with my man skills, but I assure you I haven't done something like this before and am fairly clueless to most of the goings-on.

Small catastrophes aside, Amber and I bought our Christmas gift to ourselves last week, a nice large shag rug for the living room. I've always wanted a big fuzzy rug and she found one that ticked those boxes, if you will. As you can see it is majestic and as squishy as you could imagine.

Lowes 10% payoff

Here's my first exploitataion of the lowes 10% off coupons - a Dewalt DW716 Dual Bevel 12" Miter Saw - truly a manly machine if there ever was one. I was looking at a similar Hitachi with a laser guide that also had great reviews (and a $100 cheaper price tag), but I wanted to see if these Dewalt tools are all they've cracked up to be. This will be a tool that will hopefully be with me a long time through a lot of projects, so I think the higher initial investment will be a smart choice in the end.

In other news, it appears that AES has finally mailed out our refund check for overpaying our student loan payoff so we should be getting our money back soon. The peasants rejoice!

Next up on the agenda is to whine about the ridiculous amount of leaves in our yard. When I say we have 40+ trees in our yard alone is, unfortunately for us, not an exageration. I spent the better part of 2 hours leaf blowing about half of one side of our yard over the weekend and there are already enough leaves on the ground to do it again. If I were a wealthy man you can bet your sweet rearend I'd have a leaf vacuum in my shed. Someday leaf vacuum, someday!

Frugal Tip: 10% off at Lowes

As a newish homeowner, sometimes I feel like I'm spending more time at Lowes than at home (or as much money there as I do on my mortgage). Lowes will very helpfully send you a "congratulations on moving" 10% off coupon that you can request on their website here.

That's all well and good if you're actually moving, but what if you'd like to save a few bucks independent of your housing status? Head on over to the post office and pick up a change of address packet to find the same coupon inside. The coupons are only good for a few months so you may want to run and get some every so often.

10% off everything up to $5000 - not a bad deal.

Edgar Allan Bro

I was looking through my folder of funny internet pictures and I was totally like "LAWL - Edgar Allan Bro - I am heeelarious" and then I did a google search and realized I was not the first to make that joke and I was a bit put off. Luckily the large amount of other amusing pictures soon lifted my spirits.

Not much new to report going on in life, hence the lack of blog posts. AES still remains a colossal smelly face in regards to holding $1500 of our monetary units hostage, but we're assured that the matter will be wrapped up soon.

Amber's final volleyball coaching season will soon be coming to an end, I think she'll appreciate the extra time she's going to have. We still haven't started any major work on the house, though a few weeks ago I installed a ridge vent to help ventilate the attic. I still need to pull the insulation out of the soffets on one side of the house, I got sick after I did the first side. Let's hope it was coincidence.

$0.00 Yayyyyyyyyyyy! -$1500 Oh crap!

Good news everyone, the student loan balance has been KO'd by the mighty Dreese financial assault squad on Friday, 9/24/10. It's been a long journey and we've finally reached the end! That's the good news.

The bad news is that before Amber and I decided just to pay them off (thanks to some extra money in checking), I had submitted a payment to AES for $1500. Hey there ho there, no problem, they have a "Cancel Payment" link on their website which I took advantage of so I could just go through the payoff process instead. Yesterday I come to find out that AES never processed the cancel payment, so on top of the almost $2500 it took for payoff, they decided to help themselves to the $1500 as well. Gulp.

Upon further investigation it looks like they can only issue a refund by check, which can take up to 30 days. Such service after paying out balance 28 years ahead of schedule! Ironically our biggest financial emergency in a while happens after we've paid off our debt - did not see that coming. To further annoy us, transfering money from savings (ING direct) takes 2 business days, and we had to pay a $185 fee for helping us with our bee situation, so looks like we're in the poorhouse for the time being.

For those looking for the juicy details of the the student loans I made a post on reddit so you can check it out there. Financial success - ahoy!

The end is nigh

I talk a big game, but it's mostly just that: talk. Here I am telling everyone how awesomely frugal we are by paying off the student loans in record time, yet in the last 6 months or our cell phone bill has doubled and as of this weekend we've joined the rest of the drooling masses with a satellite tv subscription.

It's been 3 or 4 years since Amber and I have had tv, and aside from sports I haven't missed it a whole lot. Thanks to the mighty interwebs we've been able to keep up to date on the shows that we like to watch, but it could never scratch the live sports itch. Along comes football season and I caved like something that caves in very easily (masterful writing, Dan).

Not only have I all but abandoned P90x (at least volleyball is started this week, I get to play tonight and tomorrow), but (confirming my fears about getting tv in the first place) I was practically welded to the couch all weekend. How on earth is anyone supposed to get anything done with football on all weekend? I will admit I got antsy a couple of times enough to wash the miata, change the oil on the motorcycle (you'd think this should be easier), take a walk, and do some work outside, but overall I felt incredibly unproductive.

Counter to negativity the previous three paragraphs convey, I'm actually quite happy and everything seems to be going really well! Life has been treating me well, and for that I am very thankful :)

Update? We don't need no stinking update.

Aside from the student-loan-debt-counter falling to $2,474.68 (balance as of today), there isn't a whole lot going on. Amber just complained about checking the website and seeing the picture of the snake (so I've included an awesome bear-explosion-atv picture instead).

We're both very excited and we feel that we will easily be able to pay off the loans by the end of October (next month!). What then, you ask? Well, mostly saving money I guess. We don't have much in terms of a proper emergency fund (the goal would be to have 6 months of expenses) and I'd like to re-start my Roth IRA and start one for Amber. I have a feeling that the "extra" money we'll have no longer going to student loan payments will be gone quicker than we'd like. We'll also get to start some work on the house which will be great!

Amber is still plugging along with volleyball and I have done my best to completely avoid my commitment to P90x. Is anyone surprised? Instead I've been trying to find ways to busy myself around the house as to not feel completely worthless.