Money, money, money, money

So I’ve been thinking about money a lot lately because sometimes it just seems like the world is raining bills and unexpected expenses are coming at you left and right.

For example, our camera, that Ella threw once months ago, is now on it’s deathbed, just waiting to be put out of its misery. Lines and static fill the screen now, leaving you unable to know exactly what is in your shot. Not ideal.

That, and a while back we turned on our small portable DVD player we’ve had for 3-4 years to find that it simply would not turn on. And with a very loooong drive to North Carolina coming soon, we think it may save our sanity, therefore a new one is on the shopping list.

Then there’s hubby’s car, in which mysterious and important dashboard lights seem to be warning us of impending doom. So we took that to the shop just tonight.

And did I mention we’re going to North Carolina? For a week? There’s lodging and food costs, maybe we’ll get some T-shirts or go do some fun things… And it all cost money.

It seems things are looking up though. Maybe our run of bad luck is coming to an end (don’t forget in the previous post our window was shot out by our neighbors).

Tonight on our way to take hubby’s car in, the dashboard light we were concerned about was no longer on. That leads us to believe maybe it’s a sensor problem and not actually that there’s some terrible oil problem or something.

I’m also really trying harder these days to stretch a dollar. So, after perusing all the Sunday ads and looking online and at Best Buy, Target and Wal-mart, we finally decided it makes sense to get the same little Canon camera we had. It was a good camera. Besides, we’ve stocked up on batteries, battery chargers and memory cards for it. And just as I found a store that carried it I remembered to check out ebates.com. The site has coupons and discounts at loads of stores and sure enough the site linked me to a deal that was $25 less than store price. Perfect!

Also tonight as we were pondering the camera situation we plugged in our DVD player and found that it works with power. So either A. we didn’t recharge the battery long enough or B. our battery is just dead. Sweet! That’ll save us $100 easily!

Also, we’ve decided we would stop and stay a night in a hotel on our drive down – I don’t think 13 hours in the car with a 1-year-old is a good idea for anyone. Just as I was about to confirm my reservation, I remembered my handy ebates site again. I swear I’m not being paid by them. But I went through their site and got a slightly cheaper rate and will get a $25 giftcard to anywhere for using my Visa card. Awesome! That’s like half a tank of gas! Or a good lunch. I’ll take it.

So I’m pretty happy about my savings. And I did start to really like some sweet little red cameras by Kodak and Nikon out there, but I will be very happy when my familiar little Canon comes back into my life …