I feel like I’ve been through the wringer, people.

So we had our new HVAC company come out to replace the compressor last Friday. After it was in, they could not get the unit to start up. They returned yesterday, tinkered around with it some more and discovered that the new compressor was bad from the factory. They went and got new compressor #2 and installed that, finally got it running, and discovered that the reversing valve is bad. The reversing valve is the thingee that makes it cool instead of heat and vice versa.

When they called me this morning, they apologized (for what? for us having a piece of crap heatpump?) and said that they would NOT charge us for any work done thus far. They offered us a new Carrier heatpump with some compatibility widgets that will make it work with our indoor air blower.

So we’re going to go with that. It will cost us $2500. This whole back and forth of will we? won’t we? (have to replace everything) has left me very irritable and crabby.

Yay.

Mr. 99k is lucky that nothing came flying at his head in the midst of my crabbiness, like say, a shoe, or perhaps the cat.

It could be worse.

We could have been out for the compressor replacement labor and cost of freeon AND $2500. Still, I’m not going to breathe easy until the darn thing is actually INSTALLED AND WORKING.

Working for a week straight.

Ah well.

Our kids have both started with their chosen spring sport, T-ball, and soccer. This means that once, sometimes twice a week we’re picking up kids from school, eating on the go, and dashing off to a practice/game. Every Saturday has a game for each kid.

After a long lazy winter of hunkering down inside where it’s nice and warm, it’s nice to get out in some nice weather, but at the same time it feels very hectic and madcap, always on the go! Last weekend I didn’t even plan out an official menu for this current week’s dinners, as with 2 evenings taken up with sports and another night where my husband had a class and therefore wouldn’t be home, there was really only 2 weeknights to plan for.

Our kids get up about 7am and we’re usually out the door at around 8ish to drop them at school (we take turns dropping off and picking up). Pick up from school/daycare is usually around 5-5:30. It’s about 15min from their school to our home, and soccer practice starts at 6:30, and weekday t-ball games start at 6. Not a lot of time in there to get from school to home to eat to get on shinguards/cleats/etc back out and to the field. And then after the practice/game, there’s not a lot of time to play, as bedtime is 8pm. We usually start their bedtime at about 7:15 and we aim for kids to be bathed, jammied up, read to and tucked in/lights off by 8pm. You can see how this doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for … well, anything!

As a result, we’ve been eating way too much fast food and the kids have been getting to bed a bit later on some days. The crunched down schedule has been taking it’s toll, not the least of which is in the form of a parent trying to hurry up a kid and being crabby about it. It’s not all bad though, last night was a class night for Mr. 99k, so I was on kid duty by myself for the evening. I left work late and thus picked the kids up late, which means there’s even less time for a real sit down dinner (even if it’s usually just chicken nuggets and tater tots, which I usually let them have on a class night). So instead of trying to hurry home and fix dinner and having no play time for the kids, I stopped at McDonalds and tried to get them to hold still long enough to get some nuggets into their tummies, then cried out, “RELEASE THE HOUNDS!” (ala the simpsons) and let them run rampant on the play equipment for a half hour. They are even learning the concepts of time budgeting, as I had to explain to them, “If we spend our time playing in the play area, that means there’s not much time to play when we get home.”

It’s definitely hard to spend quality time with your kids when there’s not enough time in the evenings to get everything in. We’ve been toying with the idea of a slightly later bedtime for the kids which *would* give us some more time. I think our older one (soon to be 6) would be fine with that, but the 4 year old could probably still use the full 11 hours of sleep. Neither one naps anymore (alas!) and when we come into their room at 7am, they’re both still usually asleep (Ms. 4 year old) or just waking up (Mr. 6yo) - a good sign that it’s not TOO much sleep.

We are going to try to do better about the fast food for the rest of the month, and have solemnly sworn that any more eating out would come out of our personal blow money categories rather than keep overspending the family eating out category.

It’s interesting to look at how time constraints and time budgeting can actually affect the fiscal budget.

Well, there’s no need to get an energy audit, for we now know the reason for the huge power bill.

We had a few very warm days last week, and even though I was already looking around for an HVAC service company, the “looking around” became more urgent as we realized our upstairs heatpump was not pumping the heat out.

I found a local company and the new HVAC guy came out Sunday and after poking around, gave us the bad news. The compressor is shot. Not only is it shot, but the entire unit is pretty cheap and crappy. He suggested that instead of sinking $1500-2000 bucks into it, we look into getting a new unit.

Unfortunately this was not news. We had someone come out in the fall* because of some problems with the heating upstairs, and I now remember (hindsight - ain’t it grand?) something being said about the compressor. I also remember they said roughly the same thing. That our unit was the cheapest piece of crap that our builder could get away with using and we’d spend our dollars better by matching them with some friends and springing for a whole new unit.

(*We didn’t call that same company again becuase a) I couldn’t remember what company it was and b) they had double charged us in the past which kind of pissed me off and finally c) the techs were always really confusing and hard to understand.)

However, after they left, our heat mysteriously started working again, and we dismissed the entire visit from our minds and went on our merry way.

Until this past Sunday.

After the new HVAC guy gave us the bad news, I asked him if anything would work.

“Cooling is a no. Heating?” I asked.
“Emergency heat only,” he replied.

Emergency heat. This is where the little lightbulb went off over my head.

“Emergency heat. That would probably suck a lot of power, wouldn’t it?” I asked.
“Why yes, yes it would,” he answered.

(Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner! Ed McMahan, tell 99k what she has won! Why, she’s won power bills from over the winter that were way way way too high, just what she’s always wanted!)

New HVAC Guy would not do any warranty work on this brand of unit, because this manufacturer is apparently really crappy to work with for warranties, and he was only a one man operation and didn’t want to spend his time driving down to The Sticks, VA to deal with them.

Long story short, after flirting with the possibility of replacing the unit, getting estimates etc. and learning that it would have to be both the outside AND the inside blower unit, and all that would run about $6-7k, we found a good, local HVAC service company that can fix the compressor under warranty (which will still cost us about $1200 for labor and freon) and we’ll also be doing maintenance agreements for both our upstairs and downstairs units with them, which includes niceties as spring and fall visits. I only feel bad about leaving the very nice New HVAC Guy, who even told us he wouldn’t charge us his diagnostic fee because he wouldn’t do it under warranty.

I’m not sure exactly what the hit will be to our emergency fund, but I’m hopeful it won’t be much. It has not been a stellar month so far, we have gone over budget in a couple categories (and they’re all “fun money” categories, whoopsies, what can I say, it was a birthday month). I also haven’t made the bulk of our credit card snowball payments yet (minimums are all paid), so I have some budget tweaking ahead of me.

Obviously, I can use money that was ear marked for debt for the HVAC issues, as the debt snowball would have to be halted until the emergency fund was replaced anyway, so whether it comes from debt money or emergency money is kind of like pah-tay-toe and puh-tah-toe. We did have some money in a “home maintenance” category as well, but not $1200 worth. I may also relook at our “tuition” category and see if my husband knows if any of the summer or fall classes he will be taking will qualify for tuition reimbursement. I planned for both of them to NOT be eligible, so if a few of them are, then I may be able to pull some of what’s built up in that category. All in all, I’m hoping that we won’t have to pull out more than $500 from our e*trade account. Even so, April is not going to be a stellar month in terms of debt repayment.

But you know what? After looking at numbers ranging from $6,000 to $7,000 for entire new units? $1200 sounds like a dream come true!

And that damn mystery power bill is now SOLVED and soon to be RESOLVED!

-99k

We got our electric bill a week and a half ago, and it is down another $100, which makes me breathe a huge sigh of relief.

However, it begs the question - why? We haven’t done anything differently in March, except not run the heat as much with the weather getting warmer.

I talked with my dad a month or so ago, and being the engineer that he is, he was running some numbers for me, “Well, say your heat fan uses X watts and you run it 70% of the time, you still wouldn’t be generating that much wattage..” etc.

Meaning, if our Kilowatt usage is this far down just because the heat hasn’t been running as much, maybe something is wrong with our furnace. My folks have a much bigger house than ours (probably double our sq footage) and also live in a much colder climate, and yet we have been using more power than they do.

We’ve generally ignored any flyers that came our way touting yearly heating/cooling system check ups, as this is a new home (4 years now), but maybe it’s time to look into something like this.

I’ve been wondering about something like this, and so took an informal poll of 3 of my co-workers. 2 did not do anything like this, and 1 did. I also asked how often they changed their air filters. One said, “A lot, at least once every 3 months,” while the other two said, “probably not often enough,” & “whenever I remember to.”

What about you? Do you have yearly system checkups? And how often do you change your filters?

-99k

GOAL ACHIEVED: NO MORE CREDIT CARD INTEREST

So when we last left our heroine, there was much dithering and swooning over whether or not to stick the heft of the credit card payments into high yield savings while only paying the minimums on the cards themselves. Then the point quickly became moot, since our heroine noticed a hefty non-capped 3% balance transfer fee, and the whole idea was dropped.

(Let’s just drop the third person now, shall we, because I SO can’t carry that off through the whole post.) When I noticed the fee, I went scouring the internet for any 0% no fee balance transfer offers, and came up with a ONE very lonely offer. Every other offer either had the $75 min BT fee, or was not for 12 months - it’s amazing really, as I can remember when we were shredding tons of these offers not so long ago. So after some scouring, I found the Citi Professional card with 0% and no fees for the first 12 months. I went ahead and applied, and promptly forgot about it until I received my shiny new card in the mail with a limit of $15,000 about a week ago.

I promptly put in a balance transfer for our remaining usaa mastercard, and am currently waiting for that to go through (any day now).

When it does, all our credit card debt will be at 0%. Here’s the breakdown, in order of which 0% rate expires first:

citi home rebate mc: $7,278
rate adjusts 12/08

discover: $6,355
rate adjusts 3/09

citi professional mc: 13,230
rate adjusts 4/09

We will be able to pay off each one of these cards before they adjust. I’m very excited to not be paying any more credit card interest!

A few remaining questions we’re going to readdress sometime:

Should we start closing cards as they are paid off?

We have 2 cards that are at a 0 balance now, USAA mastercard, and Citibank American Express. We are not going to close our USAA mc, as it has always been our primary card, has the highest credit limit, and has the longest history. The AMEX however, was opened one year ago? two years ago? (I can’t remember, I probably should check) and I don’t really see us using it ever again. For now, we’re leaving it open, as apart from the usaa card, it’s the card with the next longest history. We don’t even have cards to it, so there’s no danger of a balance running up. The other cards we have open (citi home rebate, citi professional, discover) have even shorter histories and are also questionable on whether we should keep them open or not.

I’m not sure we should even worry about hurting our FICO score. The fact is, we just refinanced our home in February and are not planning on moving for some time, we purchased my husband’s car last year and my car won’t need replacing for a few more years at least (knock on wood) - and when we do replace it, hopefully we will save up and do it with cash. I don’t see any future loans happening in our future, and if that’s the case, who cares if our credit score goes down a bit? As we pay down more cards, then the debt to credit limit ratio would get better and better, even if we hack the total credit limit down by closing a card or two.

All good points to deliberate on.. guess we will see.

Should we go back to the “sock the extra debt money into HY savings” plan?

I am thinking yes. But I have no problem letting things settle down first. We’re smack dab in the middle of birthday season (just our household, 2 over and 2 more to go) and we started the kids’ sports season (evening practices, saturday games) which means I don’t have as much time to loll around in the evenings poring over spreadsheets. I’m content to let the balance transfer go through and revisit this then.

And finally, should we start using our rewards card?

RL has piqued my interest in her comments about their month-to-month spending using a HY checking, putting expenses on a good rewards credit card during the month so the checking balance builds up and earns interest, and then of course paying it off in full each month.

We’ve already decided to start using our USAA rewards card (pretty much 1% cash back) but the HY checking account idea sounds good as well. (Charles Schwab offers a good one, although it’s down to 2.26% interest now.) Not sure we’re ready to change checking accounts, but it is on the table for discussion.

Well that’s it for now.

Any comments on the move and new design would be welcome!
(Yes, I’m vain and am wondering if anyone is out there.)

-99k

Hello all, and welcome to the new location. I was getting tired of the limitations of the free blog on the YNAB site, and decided to dive in and register a real domain. Somehow, it makes it all seem more real, don’t you think?

So, let’s get right to the March numbers, shall we? March was a very good month for us!

JUST THE CREDIT CARDS, PLEASE:

In March:
we paid $3,680 on our cards,
$145 was charged in finance charges,

for a total of $3,535 debt paydown.

Our new credit card debt total is $26,818.

(WOO TO THE HOO!)

THE ENTIRE PICTURE:

* Includes a $75 balance transfer fee.

For a month by month picture of our progress, see the Monthly Totals page.

We are now at a total of $92.4K. Next month, we should just stick our noses under the 80k mark.

Feelin’ pretty good over here!

-99k