Luckily, we were able to switch to the insurance offered through my wife’s work and decided to withdraw from my insurance plan in favor of her.

Here’s the breakdown:

Not only are our premiums a lot lower with her insurance, but so are our deductibles and our co-pays. And added bonus is that we now have vision coverage (which I need.)

Saving money while improving our benefits? I’m all for that.

I submitted my Federal and State taxes to the IRS and the California Franchise Tax Board this morning and have been notified that they were both accepted.

According to TurboTax, I will be receiving $128 back from the Federal Government around February 20th, and $708 back from California probably some time in May.

Pretty relieved. Here’s to hopefully not getting audited!

Last year I had a Federal refund of $914. In 2008, my wife and I both made substantially more money and I started a sole proprietorship and didn’t pay in. For these reasons, I don’t believe my Federal refund will be nearly as good. As of right now the Federal estimate on my refund is just $16. That amount is without the interest and taxes that I can deduct from the 1098 that I have yet to receive.

My California refund is a bit better; they are letting me keep half of my withholdings ($1481.76) because I am filing as a nonresident. But the odds of getting my California refund any time soon? Very, very, slim.

The post has a very unique perspective on the whole economic crisis. While you frequently hear from the news about everyone losing their houses and even the shirts off their back; you never hear about what works. 

And that is what Mr. Frankle’s post offers. With Mr. Frankle working in the money management field, I can’t imagine a sector that has been worse hit by the recession; however he has managed to keep a optimistic outlook, improve his own financial situation, and focus on what really matters: his family.

All around it’s a great read for anybody that is concerned about this economy. And I think that accounts for just about everybody.

I couldn’t have asked for a better time to get the money as both my wife and I get paid tomorrow, so I shouldn’t actually need this money for anything. I already moved it to my secondary savings account, and that will help to keep us from spending the money on frivolous things.

Since getting back on track, I’ve managed to pay off $2,487.45 in credit card debt. It felt great making those payments, and it seemed like a huge number at the time, but looking at the graph just reminds me how much further I need to go.

I’ve got some ideas brewing for bringing in some extra income over the next few weeks to further reduce that number.

Trying to cut back on some unnecessary expenses, I was looking into terminating my contract with DirecTV to save us roughly $90 a month. My wife was on board with this as we rarely ever watch television.

Apparently they want $20 per month left on the contract to cancel. This was raised from $12.50 that they used to charge. It’s still not an unreasonable amount, I guess. So, in my head, I thought: 9 months left on the contract x $20 = $180. Much better than the $810 it would cost me to fulfill the contract. Right? Right.

But hold on here, chief. I was informed that there is not 9, but 20 months still left on my contract!

How is this possible? I signed up 15 months ago to a 2 year agreement and haven’t signed anything OR agreed to extend my contract OR purchase new services since.

But, you see, sometime in June of last year my receiver started “shutting off” out of the blue. It just turned itself off. It took about 3 minutes to reboot it, and it would come back on.. And then go off again in a few minutes. This continued for weeks before I finally contacted DirecTV. They walked me through the steps to fix it. Of course they were unable to resolve the problem; So the solution was to replace my receiver. I was fine with that. At the time.

The problem: DirecTV extended my contract for another 2 years FROM THE DATE OF THE NEW RECEIVER. This is for a box that simply replaces their BROKEN one they had sent me before. I even had insurance on the broken one! “Somebody has to pay for the new box,” I was told. Why shouldn’t it be me?

Complaining to DirecTV was futile. In fact, if you check Google you can find almost a half million results about class action lawsuits filed against DirecTV for this shady business practice. It seems that they are all in vain though. It’s really a shame I did not know about this prior to signing up with these scam artists.

I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist - but apparently my receiver can just keep “mysteriously” breaking for no reason and of course they just keep sending out a new one so they can just keep tacking on another 2 years forever. I wonder what the life expectancy is on this equipment? 6 months?

I haven’t decided if it would be worth it to pay the 20 months ($400) now to end my contract or wait a few months for it to go back down to a reasonable amount while having some semblance of entertainment. It’s a terrible situation.

In case you were wondering, the cards were Kay Jewelers, Crescent Jewelers and my wife’s Victoria’s Secret card.

I’m not sure what to do with them now, though. These are some of our oldest lines of credit, so I don’t think we should close them. I’ve been thinking about shredding the cards; but I don’t know if I want to be “out of sight, out of mind” so to speak with open credit accounts. If I stop checking in on it, what if someone gets a card of mine and starts running it up again? That seems kind of scary. Anybody have any ideas? What do you do with your paid off credit cards?

When we moved here, I tried doing a lot of things to reduce the cost of electricity: I insulated my hot water heater and turned down it’s thermostat; I replaced all my light bulbs with CFLs; I unplugged all of my “vampire” electronics.

I did everything that I was supposed to do. Did it help? Not much.

We have a pool that I ran a few hours each day all of last winter to keep it from freezing. Our pool pump, at 2000 watts, is what I assumed to be costing us the most electricity. I ran the pump from January until September and during the summer it was on at least 12 hours a day.

We have lived in this house for a little over a year now, and our utility company provides us with a graph showing how much power we used in every given month of the year, so we now have a baseline to move forward with more electricty-saving measures.

The graph shows our monthly kW usage. Compared to January of last year, we used a little less power. In September I drained and covered the pool, so I’m attributing the decrease to that. But how much money did we actually save over last January? $10. I’ll tell you what - the hours it took to drain the pool and the cost of refilling the pool hardly seems worth $10.

Another thing that kind of surprises me is the huge jump in usage between November and December. We are on a well; so it costs us big money to pump the water out of the ground for showers, dishes, watering the lawn, etc. In November I shut off the sprinklers completely. This should have improved our bill substantially. We didn’t run our heater at all, but we did go a little nuts with Christmas lights. Could the increase be attributed to Christmas lights? If so, why didn’t it go back down in January?

For these reasons, the graph sort of perplexes me. I think it’s time to do a little power audit around the house and see exactly where all this money is going.

Since the last time I have written in my blog, we have paid off around $6,000 more of my truck. Unfortunately, we have also put about $6,000 more onto our various credit cards. Because of this, the amount of debt hasn’t changed; but it’s now at a significantly higher interest rate and demands to be paid off much sooner.