Margret Sloan

When I was a girl, my father would drive to the service station and an attendant would come out to the pump, fill up the car for you, wash the windshield and offer to check the oil for you while the gas was flowing into the car. If your tires needed air, he would refill the tires. All of these services were free with the price of the gas. If you needed the oil changed, a flat tire fixed, or a new headlight, the mechanic in the service bay would take care of it for you and not charge much for the little bit of time it took to put in the new parts as long as you bought the parts from the station.

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.

Is there someone in your life like my step daughter? When she calls or stops by, the first thought that crosses my mind is, “What does she want now?” or “I wonder how much this little visit is going to end up costing us?”

The girl cannot handle money. We’ve tried everything to give her a hand and help her, but she messes it up and doesn’t even appreciate the help we provide. She just sees her Dad as a walking ATM machine and I’m about to put an end to the endless cash flow from our pockets to hers.

I found a website that gives loans to people with bad credit, called Personal Loans Pro and next time she asks for money we’ll show her the website to apply for a personal loan instead of just doling out our cash. They specialize in Bad Credit Personal Loan and she can start managing her finances in a mature way and learn to stand on her own two feet.

Most of the mail I get from the mailbox at the street will be bills and junk mail. As more of the places sending me bills accept online payments, I have less bills in the mail - but unfortunately not less bills. So now most of the mail is junk mail, and the worst of the junk are the so-called “pre-approved credit” offers for credit cards and car loans.

I used to toss all the junk mail into the trash, and in this area everyone hauls their big trash cans that look like dumpsters down their driveways to the street once a week and leave them there all day (sometimes all night if you put it out the night before) for the collection truck to show up and empty the cans.

The big problem with this is that the criminals have figured out that they can get into your dumpster and take out your pre approved credit offers and other trash that you’ve thrown out with personal information. Then they send in or call the credit companies pretending to be you and they take the credit in your name and start charging all kinds of purchases in your name. If they took you trash and did this to you, how would you ever know? How would you find out what they’ve done and how could you prove that it wasn’t you?

That is what identity theft is all about and why it is such a huge problem for people. This kind of problem is what companies like lifelock help stop from happening. It’s a service that protects your identity and your credit, and it helps reduce or stop the amount of pre-approved credit offers that hit your mailbox, like bait to the criminal fishermen.

Last time my daughter got contact lenses we went to Sam’s Club and were told that her prescription was out of date. Evidently a prescription for contacts is only good for 6 months now. I find that strange - a prescription for glasses is good for two years and I would think that contacts should be good for two years, also. But Sam’s wouldn’t fill the prescription and we had to go find an optometrist and pay for a new exam.

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!

During the divorce there were many times that there was too much month left at the end of the money. I tried to fix some basic priorities and make cuts as necessary. My first priority was the roof over our head - I paid the rent on time every month. After that came childcare. I paid the babysitter every week no matter what. Third was food - I made sure the kids had nutritious food on hand for both breakfast and dinner, with after school snacks like popcorn and fruit available every day. Then came the rest of the worries - car payment, utilities, insurance, gas, clothes. Whew - I wonder how I made it through some of those times.

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.