Well, I called a guy that TB volunteers with at a local fire department and who owns his own shop. He agreed that I should probably get the maintenance done soon since I'm pretty far over the manufacturers recommended time to do it. He quoted me a price of $773.52 w/ tax, which includes changing out all the belts and the water pump. Also, a bunch of other little things are included like when they take out the water pump they do some things on the cooling system and antifreeze as well. I think this is pretty much a no-brainer to get this done. It is just hard to part with money now that I am trying to make it work in my favor. (Yeah, I should have told that to myself when I spent over $400 on eating out last month. You know you wanted to say it!)
My check on Friday will be (by about $500) more than a normal check would be because I am getting a performance bonus and I also have 10 hours of OT on it. We have the ability to get a performance bonus about once per month and I usually always get it. Sometimes it is more than others. This just happened to be a really good month. For the OT pay, I have been working 5 hours per week for the past month or so. It's not too much but it give my check an added little boost.
On the coupon/ad shopping front, I am really starting to get involved in it. I bought a Sunday paper last week and clipped a few coupons for stuff that I know we'll be using. Grocery store ads came in the mail yesterday and I went through them last night making a list of the items I want to price match at Wal-Mart. My goal is to do most of my shopping at Wal-Mart and price match the other's ads at Wal-Mart. Unless, of course, there are BOGO items or really good coupons that I can use at the other stores (since Wal-Mart won't double or triple like they do). For the past two weeks, I have done the price matching thing and it is really easy. Why I never did this before, I don't know. It's actually kind of fun. Oh, and I found some pretty cool websites (maybe this is old news) called taylortownpreview.com and couponmom.com. (Sorry, no hyperlinks. I'm having to hurry). On the Taylortown site, every Wednesday they list the coupons that will be in the next week's paper. I think that is pretty cool! The couponmom site has where you can plug in your local stores and see what coupons get you the best deals.
Also, in the Sunday paper there was a Walgreens insert that had some good coupon buys in it. I went and got just those things last night. They had 12 packs of DP products for $2.00, Kraft mac & cheese 2 for $1 and Van De Kamp pork and beans 3 for $1. I got the limit for each of those items and spend just over $15.00.
Ok, I have rambled enough for today. I am off to try and figure out how to add my favorite blogs over on the left side of the page.
Of cars and coupons
April 25th, 2007 at 02:08 pm