I use mycheckfree.com for a lot of bills because it's easier for me to manage my household bills all in one place electronically.
This is utterly weird to admit, but I miss paying all the household bills since I moved in with The Boy. Everything is in his name, and we have separate bank accounts, so I write him one check once a month. All I pay otherwise is my credit card (which is going to be paid off fully next week) and my car insurance every 6 months.
I just get a really anal-retentive thrill paying the bills and keeping all the finances in order.
I also balance my checkbook every month as soon as my statement is available online. I am a nerd.
I always used to balance my checkbook every month, because my mom drilled the importance into me. And then some time during the 7 years I lived alone, I just stopped doing it. And about 3-4 years' worth of bank statements piled up on my desk, and I just added to the pile every month and shrugged. Then for some reason, one day I decided to try to balance my checkbook. It was an utter mess, and I opted to go back about 2 years' worth of statements and straighten out the math and then move forward from there.
It turns out that 3-4 years' worth of my math mistakes in my checkbook register really added up. When I was finally finished balancing my checkbook, it turned out that I had about $300 MORE than I thought I had, because of how much I screwed up the math.
It was awesome -- like a tax return or something. But since then, thanks to first Microsoft Money (when I had a Compaq Presario), and then Quicken, I balance my checkbook every month, just to make sure everything is copacetic.
Yeah, I am a major, major nerd.
A Ford Crown Vic would also have a lot of room and are very tough mechanically, but they suck down gas and are big. On the plus side, watch traffic slow down around you.
Oh man, that drove me insane once when we had a Crown Vic as a rental. Every time you'd come up behind traffic on the freeway everyone would slow down and hold steady at or below the speed limit. So aggravating.
That's funny about the Crown Vic. I hadn't thought about that although I do the slowing down thing too.
My parents have a Taurus. DH isn't comfortable driving it, but Brendon isn't his size. I'll have him size check.
which is going to be paid off fully next week
Woo!
Right??? Like Patrick Stewart in Othello.
I saw that! And also Avery Brooks as Othello with, oh, shit, what's his name? Homicide: LOTS guy... as Iago. Andre Brauer. So much awesome.
Oh, man. Laura, you car search prompted me to go look for my desired vehicle, and a dealer in Oakland has exactly what I want: a pre-2004 manual Jeep Wrangler with less than 100,000 miles: [link] Pretty color, too. Now to mentally justify the expense....
Our Ford Focus fits 6'6" mr. flea. It's a 2000. They are available pretty cheap - I think ours with 120K miles is valued at about $2500. And it runs fine. Well, as well as it ever did.
Did Avery Brooks rock Othello as hard as I imagine he did?
Star Wars as retold by someone who has not seen it: [link] (YouTube video) Warning: Don't be eating or drinking anything while watching.
Yeah, we do automatic payments for all our bills, too. But we do it through the bank, and not where the vendor is authorized to take money directly out, because we feel like that may be prone to abuse. So we still have to pay attention to the bills, to make sure we're paid current (and sometimes we pay over the amount accidentally) but we get the ease of not having to deal with paper, and we hit the deadlines. It means we can do everything that way, including our giving, because the bank will send anyone a check we want them to.
We also have a bi-monthly household budget meeting. We can tell when we don't have it, 'cause that's the only time we get into trouble anymore. And we used to get into trouble, let me just say.
We're in the market for a car, but I just can't figure out what we can get. We want something smaller with better mileage because most of our locations now will store our instruments, so we don't need to do all that hauling all the time. But we live on a very dirt road, so we need something 4x4 or all wheel at the least that can handle the clay when it turns to mud. Anything that will do that a) doesn't have that great mileage and b) we can't afford.
