One of my good friends that I’ve know since the 1980′s is retired and having a lot of health problems. She had to to go to the hospital recently for total hip replacement surgery. They kept her in the hospital for 3 days and then moved her to a nursing home for the rest of her recovery and rehab – estimated to take about 8 weeks, maybe longer, depending upon her healing and progress.

I can just imagine how upsetting it must be to realize that you have to spend 2 months in a nursing home. I truly hope that the surgery goes well and that she recovers quickly.

Another good friend is dealing with serious financial issues and having problems with her bank. She is trying to work with the bank to get everything resolved, but her fiance is a hothead and every time she makes headway with the bank he gets upset and causes trouble for her. I don’t know what to say when she calls me, crying, because I cannot give her money and even though she is convinced that the lack of money is her problem, I believe that her real problem has nothing to do with money.

One of my cars is a little Mazda MPV and I love this car. Its smaller than a SUV and more versatile than a sedan. But the brakes are starting to feel a little grabby and I am concerned about the thunk I heard today when it went into first gear at the traffic light. I hope I don’t have to spend a lot of money on repairs this month, April is always hard on my pocketbook and I need to put off as many big expenses as I can.

Ironically, with all the driving we’ve done over the years and especially this past week, it’s here at home that hubby gets pulled over by the police. Ostensibly for not wearing a seatbelt, which is true – he just refuses to wear a seatbelt over any and all protests by me. But it’s the law here and they changed the enforcement provisions of the state law so that you can be stopped just for not wearing a seat belt. Up until they changed it, the seatbelt violation could only be a secondary reason to get a ticket.

So, the cop wants to see his driver’s license (no problem), the registration (no problem although the tags expire the end of this month and we need to get the emissions inspection done this week to renew the tags) and proof of insurance. Oops. Where is the insurance card? The one in the car expired last month and we haven’t received the new one in the mail yet. That’s a problem, since the cop wants to see the current card or hubby gets a ticket. Oh well. At least you can get the insurance squared away and have the ticket dismissed. If he had gotten a ticket for the seat belt violation then he would have no defense and would be paying for that ticket with cash, court costs and points on his license.

Today I have to call the insurance company today and find out where the new proof of insurance cards are. And I get voice mail. Sigh.

If I have a full hour to spend on R&R I’ll try to find a good partner and play one or two Spades games. If I only have a few minutes I’ll play something fast, like backgammon or cribbage. Sometimes I like the cutthroat strategies of Hearts to sharpen my mind. These are not time wasters as much as they are mental exercises to keep me alert and sharpen my critical thinking skills.

I’m going to join in at work with all the NFL pick ‘em games and maybe even join a fantasy team this year. The corruption in the league is getting so obvious that even I can predict the winners of every game, so I might as well make some money off it, too.

Everything they do is about generating fees for themselves and customer service has gone out the window. I’ve had banks refuse to take my U. S. currency as a deposit to my account. I’ve had banks tell me that it is too close to their closing time (15 minutes before the doors were to close) for them to help me and to come back the next day. Now the bank where I take our company’s weekly deposit – two checks and a deposit slip – tells me that I will no longer be able to make my commercial deposit at their drive through windows. I must find a parking spot in the crowded lot and walk into the bank and stand in line with all those people who have no I.D., have accounts at other banks, and all those other time consuming banking issues, to make a deposit that takes all of 2 minutes at the drive through.

On Monday I’ll be calling their other branches to see if this is a new policy with all the locations or just the branch close to my house. If this is their policy for all locations, I’ll have to find another way to do my banking business each week.

So the days when she does have cell phone service, she has a ringtone that she downloaded and it plays in the ear of the person calling until she answers the phone of it goes to voicemail. I knew the ringtone had to be a rap song – she loves that stuff – but I’ve heard the song maybe 100 times and I can’t understand the words. Then it occurred to me that I can look up the lyrics for any rap song and also listen to free ringtone samples by going to the web site called rapartists.com.

I found the song she is using for her ringtone by Kanye West called “Touch the Sky.”

She’s been trying to make a go of it on her own since she was 16 but didn’t pop into our lives until about 3 years ago when she showed up on our doorsteps with a suitcase and her son looking for someplace to sleep. And I don’t mind helping her, but at some point you have to cut the apron strings or kick the baby bird from the nest or whatever you have to do to get them on their own two feet.

So our talk will be about taking financial responsibility for herself and her son. I don’t think her mother ever talked with her about anything like balancing a checkbook, using a debit card and establishing credit. But in today’s world, the young people need to learn these things and be smart about their credit to build a secure future for themselves.

If I could make my dream come true, I would start a new business someplace where I want to live, pack up and leave here. One of the things stopping me is getting all the financing I would need. Banks are harder to deal with every day and I’m not interested in taking on partners. For one thing I want autonomy in making the business decisions and for another I don’t want to share the profits from my own hard work with people who don’t do anything except put in the start up money.

Nowadays you do all of that yourself. Which is fine if you are handy with tools and have someplace like a covered and lit garage to work on your car. The rest of us have to resort to our own devices. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I can’t afford to take my car to Firestone every time a little happens to my car when they are going to charge $100 for every little maintenance job. Last week I took in the car and asked for an oil change and a new air filter. The bill was $100. That’s absurd – I was expected to pay $35, tops.

I’ll have to find someplace else to take care of these routine maintenance issues for me, because I can’t afford the excessive Firestone charges.

My daughter has a nice pair of glasses that she uses for driving and for days when her allergies are acting up. The spring pollen really bothers her eyes, so she just wears her glasses every day when the pollen is bad. The rest of the time she would rather wear contacts. She feels more attractive without the glasses, but her allergies only last for a couple of weeks each year. And I think there may be some value in giving her eyes a break from the contacts for a few weeks, too.

Since everything is in bloom here right now, she back to glasses for a while. I think she’ll be ready to go back to contacts again around the first of the month. So now is the perfect time to shop for new contacts.

I found a site on the internet that has all the popular contacts brands and very good prices – they are even cheaper than the Sam’s Club prices. I compared the prices of her acuvue oasys lenses against the price the eye doctor was going to charge and also the Sam’s Club price, and found the website saves almost 70% from the retail price. I’ll go ahead and order 8 boxes for her and use the mail in rebate – we’ll end up saving over $60. That savings is for each eye, so we’ll actually save over $120 total!

A service that was not available to me at the time was the short term, payday loans. That really would have helped a couple of times when I was desperate for a payment due. Sometimes the fees for overdue payments or reconnection fees are much more than the interest a payday loan would have charged. If you have thoughts on whether a payday loan can help you, check out this website and read their payday loans archive. They are there to help with short term solutions, so be smart about your finances and don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it.

1. Get off Lists – go to the website for the Direct Marketing Association, dmachoice.org and click on “Remove my name from those lists.” This is free, takes about 4 months to see the full impact of reduced unwanted mail, and stays in effect for 3 years.

2. Don’t Get on New Lists – marketers build new lists from product registration forms, contests and sweepstakes. Don’t fill those out.

3. Protect Your Identity – Register at optoutprescreen.com to opt out of prescreened credit offers. These offers come from the four credit bureaus, Experian, Transunion, Innovis and Equifax, who sell your data to the credit card companies.

4. Remain Anonymous – Sign up for grocery store loyalty cards and other membership-based discounts when you don’t need to actually receive anything in the mail from them by using a fake name with no address.

But the people in trouble are still a small percentage of Americans, and for many families moving to a new home sometime this year is something they have to do, often because their company requires them to move due to a transfer or promotion. Others move because they want a better neighborhood with better schools, or some are downsizing because their children are grown and they no longer need such a large house with all the higher bills for things like maintenance, taxes, and utilities.

If you are in a position where you must sell your home quickly, you may be interested in a company called We Buy Houses. They will pay cash for houses and take the worry of listing your home with a realtor, paying a realtor’s commission, and the hassles of showing your house to dozens of strangers and waiting for a good offer from a buyer.

So although I have a carpet cleaning machine and use it about once a month, I feel like calling the professionals with their heavy duty chemicals and equipment will do a more thorough job if I hire them once a year for a spring cleaning.

What is annoying is the push by the person who shows up to do the cleaning to upsell you on a lot more services and cost. The carpet cleaner told me that I need extra spot treatments and extra conditioners and extra enzyme treatments and tried to run my bill up from the $20 coupon rate to $300. That’s obscene. I told him I wanted the coupon rate and nothing more and he played it out, telling me he had to get special permission from the home office to not do the extra treatments, because he was concerned that I would not be satisfied with the $20 process. He came back and said the home office had authorized him to give me a big discount if I wanted to go ahead and get all the extras for just $200. But I held firm and said I wanted the $20 and to quit wasting my time and get busy.

He finally did the job and it turned out OK, but I’m still very annoyed at the high pressure sales tactics and the huge difference in price that they tried to get from me. We spent more arguing about the cost than it took him to just do the job. He was so disagreeable that I felt he might deliberately sabotage the cleaning or steal something from my house, so I had to stand there at the hallway and watch his every move. It was a totally unpleasant morning although now I do have a clean carpet.

You might even be pleasantly surprised when you check and find that you might be eligible for a better interest rate on your home mortgage. With it so hard to find qualified buyers, a lot of people are deciding to stay in their homes a bit longer and some are remodeling. To get the extra money to put on an addition or finish the basement, some people are looking into House Refinancing, which puts the equity of your home to work for you. Just try to leave a cushion of equity in your home and never finance 100% of your home’s value. The value of your home might go down as the market goes through it’s adjustment, and you don’t want to be in a bind if that happens. An educated borrower is a prudent borrower.

The paper money is not an issue, but working with coins has us both frustrated. If you have any ideas or suggestions on how to make this make sense to a 5 year old, please send me your comments.

My New Year’s resolution was to get the car running again this year and slow but surely fix it up. First, I need to get a new battery – this one is dead as a doornail. Then I have to din out why the “check engine” light is on. I suspect it is the catalytic converter. Ouch. But if that’s all it needs, I can fix that, put gas in it and get new tags on the car by the end of the month.

What a cool idea. I’d like to skip the cheating husband and divorce and depression part, but I’m down with going to Europe. If any of you friends want to send me to Europe – perhaps France? – I will certainly be glad to go.