I just found this out about the economic stimulus checks and thought I would share. They’re going out based on your social security number, and varying in time depending on the last two digits of your social. Looks like we’ll be getting ours in June.

DIRECT DEPOSIT

Last two SSN digits: Payment will be transmitted by:
00 through 20 May 2
21 through 75 May 9
76 through 99 May 16

PAPER CHECK

Last two SSN digits: Payments will be mailed by:
00 through 09 May 16
10 through 18 May 23
19 through 25 May 30
26 through 38 June 6
39 through 51 June 13
52 through 63 June 20
64 through 75 June 27
76 through 87 July 4
88 through 99 July 11

It’s dangerous for me to go into home improvement stores. I see so many things I want to buy and get, but it’s just not feasible. I have to remind myself that the house doesn’t need all these things right now we can get them gradually.

Sure it would be nice to have patio furniture for the deck, an ornamental fountain, start a fruit and vegetable garden, put plants around the borders of the yard, and even buy a hot tub (something my husband wants to do) but we don’t need all that.

I saw a really nice outdoor bench and table at Ace Hardware yesterday which was only $90, but how would I get it home in my dinky car? and the $90 is better served going towards food for Saturday and gas for today. It’s easy in this commercial era of immediate gratification to let your wants become your needs, but especially when hubbie and I are trying to get our debt to income ratio down, down DOWN, we need to stop spending. Besides once we’re sorted there’s a good chance we could find half the stuff we want through something like FreeCycle, and let someone else reuse things that we don’t need in return.

One of the problems we’re experiencing in our house is lack of storage space, or more accurately storage space of the wrong type. There are many things that we need to store but can’t use certain cupboards and cabinets for because of the almost-two-year-old tornado (the munchkin). For example, we have some liquor and it would be great to use wine racks for that, but I’ve seen at his grandparent’s house that wine racks are disastrous if they’re kept at lower level, and we have no where stable enough to keep a wine rack at a level out of his reach, so all the liquor is on top of the fridge, which disrupts the use of the above-the-fridge cabinets.

The other night he tipped over one of the DVD cabinets we have, well, actually, the only remaining DVD cabinet that we have (the rest of the DVDs are on wall racks). This cabinet stores the DVD box sets which won’t fit in the wall racks because they’re too wide. Now the glass door is broken off and the cabinet is essentially a shelf now. I’m just thankful that he isn’t all scratched up from the glass breakage, because as I was telling the man at Ace Hardware yesterday you can’t put a price on your child’s life.

I was ordering some wire fencing because we ran out and have only done half the fence, and he says, “Well, that’s our most expensive by-the-foot, just so you know, we have some other that’s half the price,” and I said, “Yes, but if I get that with the bigger gauge, he’ll be able to climb the fence easily, but the other with the tiny squares (1/4 inch) he won’t be able to climb, and the whole point of the fence is to keep him in the back yard so he doesn’t escape and get run over on the street,”

“Good point,” the guy replied and cut me 25 feet of fence wire, because it’s so worth $75 of fence to know my son’s safe, right?

I knew it wouldn’t take long. I was remembering that I was supposed to be setting money aside because of our need for mortgage disability insurance. I remember when we got our life insurance quotes and thinking we would never swing that, now it looks like we may have to drop some of that to get the mortgage disability, or you know, stop eating.

I start to think well, it’s okay we don’t really need it, then I remember that my husband’s hopefully pending surgery and I get nervous.

At least I got the taxes finished. So we’ll have our refund coming in…but it’s going to take at least a month because I have to paper file it due to some problems with the efile, and we have to get a check because I couldn’t find my check book and didn’t want to put things off any longer. It has to be in before the 15th after all. Yargh.

Paying bills, is what I mean. It bites. It really does. Especially right now, but we knew it was going to be tough moving into the house, the first few months…and it is. A few months more and things should get easier.

I need to clear things out like I’ve been saying I will and put some things up for sale, get some more jewelry made, get the taxes filed. That’s the big one, the taxes. It’ll be good to be able to pay down some of the credit card bills too, that would be really nice. With the taxes I can pay off the Target card entirely and get it cut up, and then I can make a couple of double payments on the other two to get things down again, that’ll be very good.

Barter system. I start feeling like we should go back to the barter system around now.

In this case it’s a thank you to Val at BusyMomma for sharing her Thank Yous with me after I posted mine yesterday.

Thank you, Val.

I’ve been pretty busy the past few days because I’ve been helping my Mum to move again. I still need to catch up with my Photo a Day blog and do some tarot readings for people. I have some earrings and jewelry to make as well.

It’s also bill-paying day, which really sucks. Things are going to be tight for a little while. We really have to watch our spending until we can balance things out.

Every once in a while things come up which remind me that my husband and I need to make sure that things are going to be alright when we pass on. We’ve been sorting some things out with our insurance company which point out to us that we have to make sure and sort out things with “power of attorney” so that we have someone who can look after our son if we should both die at the same time due to some horrible set of circumstances like a car accident.

I don’t have to worry about burial policy for myself too much because I have a cremation already paid for, but there will be other final expenses such as a container for my ashes and a memorial plaque or something like that should it be considered necessary.

My husband will be taken care of by the police force, but we need to check and see if that’s contingent on something happen to him on duty or not. We do both have life insurance policies but nothing extra, really.

Our insurance company has been talking to us about mortgage protection which would pay for the mortgage if something happened to either of us. It’s going to put our monthly payments up a little…but then if nothing’s coming in that’s going to be an even bigger drain, and I wouldn’t want to be foreclosed on after something happened to my husband…

I’m going to get some Emu Australia boots and stomp all over the people at Blue Cross.

It’s now day ten. We were told that we would get the information from them in 5-7 business days. We got a letter from them today which reminded me we had not got their check. So, I called up, and they, of course, had to talk to hubbie and verify they were allowed to talk to me and then transfer me to a “specialist” and they told me that I was misinformed. That it takes 30 days to cancel a check and reissue a replacement, but that it was initiated on the 5th of this month and is “in process” so we should have it before the 30 days is up, and gave me a number to give to the EMTs so that we don’t get in collections.

This is SECOND time that we’ve been misinformed about something and it’s getting old.

Last year when we had to send something to appeals we were told that would go through in two to three weeks and then found out four weeks after we were told that we were misinformed and it would take 60-90 days at least. I wish the people up there would stop giving bogus answers and just tell the truth for once.

But I need to go my son’s learned to undress himself and I heard the tell tale sounds of nappy removal.

I’m really frustrated with the taxes right now. I thought I had everything sorted out, but then when I did the error check its’ telling me that I have an error on line 14b and have to fix something on line 2; but with the  way that the program works I have no idea which part of the program it’s referring to.

On the upside when I’m trying to find a way to fix this I find $15 extra somewhere that’s giving us more on our tax return…BUT I still can’t find where the error is. They tell me that I can ignore the error but then I can’t e-file and while we have time to sort out mailing it because it’s only just February but I’m afraid that I’ve screwed something up somewhere…grrr…I hate this.

It’s been a fairly long day again today, mostly because of taxes. I’ve been working on our taxes since last night, and I think I’ve managed pretty well. Even with all the business and paid blogging we’re still getting all of the deduction that we were initially entitled to from hubbie’s paycheck. Unfortunately for us we don’t qualify from EIC, but we’re doing okay even with that. We’re getting a bit more back than we got last year.

Other than that I’ve been tidying up and decorating again. I haven’t eaten yet. I’ve got a roast cooking and some potatoes on the go, but if I work on that it’s probably going to be ten p.m. before anything’s ready. I think I’ll just make myself some chicken nuggets, still it’s going to be a while before I get to test out our foam mattress for the night, because I’m half way through sorting out the curtains. I realize I missed picking up a valance for the kitchen window but that can wait until my next pay check. I need to sort out the new price list for the tarot site too. It’s on my “to do” list. In the mean time I’m watching NCIS Season One, and it’s keeping me entertained. I’m not focussed enough to re-watch the first episode of LOST and try and make sense of that. Maybe once I get the taxes finished. I still need to sort out the mortgage portion, and see if I have to get the records of us buying hubbie’s car, but given it wasn’t anything posh like a hybrid I don’t know if we have to declare it.