Layout:
Home > Financial musings

Financial musings

February 4th, 2013 at 05:12 pm

I called Direct Loan (the old loan servicer that sold our student loan without warning) first thing this morning to see if they'd received the payment. They had, and said they would have to transfer it to Sallie Mae.

On a whim, I went to the Sallie Mae site and tried to create a login for NT. Success! And lo and behold, his DL loan balances are there. Phew! Big relief.

Now I just have to check up on it periodically until the payment I sent to DL gets to SM!

***

This weekend I signed up for a new internet provider. The monthly cost will be $49.99, $5.32 less than my old price with Comcast, $9.51 less than the new Comcast price. I did have to buy a modem for $53.87, which we can make up in the budget in 6 months (if we count how much the new Comcast bill is) or 10 months (if I count how much we save over the old Comcast bill).

After I signed up, it occurred to me there will be some overlap of billing. I can't remember exactly but I think Comcast bills near the end of the service period whereas this new service bills at the beginning of the monthly period. So, if we overlap by a month, that's an extra $49.99 that will need to be made up. If so, it will take 11 months to recoup if I'm counting the new Comcast bill, a year and a half (19 months) if I'm calculating at the old Comcast amount!

Even if so, considering Comcast WILL raise their price again in January, and my friend said this new service hasn't raised her bill in years, I think it's still worth it.

I'll cancel with Comcast once we get the new modem and confirm the new service works. I do have 15 days to request a full refund with the new service, so if I start getting cold feet, there's time to change my mind.

***

Still haven't heard whether this immigration lawyer wants to consult with us or refer us to someone else. I'm going to try and hold out until the end of the week before I bug him. I do want my tax preparer to have time to do our taxes on time, but we've still got a while before it starts to get down to the wire.

***

Last week, I thought I'd forgotten to count a $60 grocery purchase, so we started February way behind. But when I checked my Amex account this weekend, we had a $60 credit on our account. I think what happened is the purchase lingered in Pending for longer than usual, so I had already factored it in, got confused and ended up double-paying Amex for that purchase. So we had $60 back in our grocery budget! Now we have $116 for next week's shopping, so if we're smart we should be able to (fingers crossed!) finally get caught up for the first time in months.

And, we only have 8 more weeks of buying formula before SL can switch to regular milk! I'm so obsessed with this milestone because of how much our grocery budget will ease up!

***

I just scored about $40 in Target credit! Well, what happened is I used some of my Target gift cards from Xmas to buy a new baby monitor because ours was going crazy with static in the middle of the night. I ordered it online and by the time it got to us, we'd fixed the problem with our old monitor. I held onto the new monitor for a month or so to make sure the old one was definitely fixed, and we haven't had any problems, so I returned the old one and got my $40 back on a gift card.

This will be helpful because there were a few little things I wanted to get (V-day gifts for the kids, frames and prints of family photos to hang up) that I won't have to fund out of my spending money. Yay!

2 Responses to “Financial musings”

  1. Tightwad Kitty Says:
    1360003780

    I would budget in an overlap on internet bills then if there is not you have a nice surprise.

  2. FrugalTexan75 Says:
    1360034787

    That's good news about being able to see that the loan transferred properly!

Leave a Reply

(Note: If you were logged in, we could automatically fill in these fields for you.)
*
Will not be published.
   

* Please spell out the number 4.  [ Why? ]

vB Code: You can use these tags: [b] [i] [u] [url] [email]