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Can You Help Me With a Money Emergency?

July 19, 2009 By

cross-posted from MomReviews

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*deep breath*

I need $100 by Thursday.  I had been counting on my monthly payout from Linkworth for the text ads I run on Table for Five, but they don’t payout unless you earn $100, and I only earned $95.00. The money will get added to my payout for next month, but I leave for BlogHer on Thursday morning.

The money will be spent on gas for the car I’m driving there and back (I’m taking 2 other people down and 3 people back, but once the tank of gas the car is delivered with is gone, we’ll have to chip in to refill it),  lunch on the way there and back, tips for the doorman and any necessary cab rides, and if I have enough, a souvenir BlogHer t-shirt which they’ve never had before.

$100 might not even be enough but I feel bad enough asking for help as it is. I’d also like to point out that while this blog does have text link advertisers, the amounts they are willing to pay are not large, and the money I received for those ads this month has unfortunately already been spent. On the mortgage payment. And keeping my kids in Cheerios.

So, my dear readers, I’m asking for your help. I know money is tight for everyone, anything you can donate is greatly appreciated. It used to be commonplace for blogs to have “Tip Jars” but that practice fell out of favor a few years ago. Since I have a PayPal account and a debit card I can use to access the money, I’ve created a PayPal donate button.  You can transfer money from your PayPal account to mine, or pay with a credit card.

When I say any amount is greatly appreciated, I really mean it. If everyone who reads this blog donates $1.00, it would take less than a day for me to have what I need.

OR…you can ask me to DO STUFF FOR MONEY! That’s right, thanks to PayPal, you can send me money BUT I have to agree to do something in exchange.  Click the link, type in your name, my name and the dollar amount,  then fill in your PayPal address and my PayPal address, which is elizabeth(at)table4five(dot)net.

What am I willing to do for your money?  Write posts, review sites, post text link ads or button ads (length of ad would depend on amount paid),  whatever you can come up with that’s appropriate for a family-friendly blog :)

I’ll answer potentially embarrassing questions, help you with WordPress problems,  just name it.

I really hope those of you who are regular readers know how hard it was for me to write this and how grateful I will be for any donations.  BlogHer is the most important conference I go to all year, every year I come back having learned something that adds value to my blog and having made new friends and contacts that often turn into long-term relationships. The vendors I meet at this conference could be the giveaway sponsors of next month!

I’ll close this by saying thank you in advance for anything you can do to help.

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Here’s the story, of a lovely lady-who-couldn’t-keep-up-with-the-bill-paying

April 10, 2009 By

This is the story of how I lost my “job” as the family bill-payer, and how my husband switched from paying bills online and over the phone to writing actual paper checks. Which he put in envelopes with actual stamps and return address labels. Return address labels that I got for free from VistaPrint after choosing from nine pages of designs, all I paid was shipping. It had been so long since I wrote a check, I’m surprised our credit union’s fraud department didn’t suspect the checks had been stolen from us.

For the last, oh, 20 years of our relationship, I have been in charge of paying bills for Chris and I. I used to have this obsession with keeping the checkbook in pristine order. So much so that if I messed up a line, I would make a big X through everything and start over on a new page. I am so not kidding.

When I worked at the credit union, I had the perfect setup. I could access my own checking account record from my desktop terminal, so every morning I would meticulously record every cash withdrawal and written check, marking off the ones that had cleared. Once they introduced debit cards, I would go through any receipts in my wallet and record those transactions, marking those off when they posted.  You would have thought that my checkbook WAS my job.

Even after I left the credit union, I kept it up thanks to the home banking site. I had a spiral notebook where I made budgets for each upcoming paycheck, which bill we were going to pay when.  Right up until this past year, in fact, I was doing a wonderful job, if I do say so myself, at keeping our bills paid and our checkbook correct.

And then this past November, everything kind of fell apart.  I posted a request on Help A Reporter Out for products to review for Christmas, and had no idea what I was getting into. I could barely, BARELY keep up with the wave of emails and products and boxes that were piling up, and I just plain stopped paying attention to the mail. Like, at all.

Until one day near the end of January when the phone rang and it was Comcast. We were three payments BEHIND and they were going to shut off our service unless we paid something. I was HORRIFIED.  This was part of my JOB as the stay at home parent, keeping the bills paid. And I had blown it.

Now, you all know I love my husband. You know he works hard at a job he has to commute to, that he comes home and does things like cook dinner or do dishes, that he does all the laundry. You know he is a freaking AWESOME father. And now? He is a freaking AWESOME BILL PAYER.

That’s right. He took away my “job” as keeper of the bills and checkbook. He piled up all the bills, made a list, and instead of paying online and over the phone like I was doing, started writing actual paper CHECKS.  Within three pay periods he had us completely caught up with Comcast and well on our way to being completely caught up with everyone else. He started a spreadsheet on our shared drive and kept track of what he paid, the check number, when it cleared.

In a word, he ROCKED our budget. We are caught up! And I swallowed my pride and admitted I made a big mess of things and have thanked him profusely and repeatedly for pulling us out of what could have been a big disaster. We didn’t have anything shut off or sent to collections or anything.

And so that is the story of how my husband took over bill-paying and went back to the “old fashioned” way of paying them. I don’t have an affiliate account with VistaPrint (although that would be awesome since I love them so much), so I won’t get paid if you click, but take a sec and check out their site. 140 return address labels are free, you just pay shipping! Free is good. Having the bills caught up is EXTRA GOOD.

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Another scary money conversation at my house

September 30, 2008 By

From New York Times Business online:

“Even before the opening bell, Monday looked ugly. But by the time that bell sounded again on the New York Stock Exchange, seven and a half frantic hours later, $1.2 trillion had vanished from the United States stock market.”

And from Money.CNN.com:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — First, the good news: Even if warnings of economic catastrophe aren’t enough to win approval of a controversial $700 billion Wall Street bailout, the economy is not at risk of falling into a depression, most experts agree.

During the Great Depression, unemployment shot up to as much as 25% in 1933. That came after the gross domestic product, the broadest measure of economic activity, plunged 13% the previous year.

Millions of people lost their savings when banks closed without any insurance for its customers’ deposits. Few economists are predicting economic pain of that magnitude.

Now the bad news: Even if the plan to buy up bad mortgage debt from troubled banks and Wall Street firm does pass, it probably won’t be enough to stop the economy from getting worse than it is today.

And if the battered credit markets fail to restart, either because the bailout fails to win Congressional approval or it doesn’t work as planned, the nation could be facing its worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

I admit, I don’t think about the future. I don’t “save for a rainy day”. But as my husband and I sat watching “Heroes” last night, we talked about the economy. I asked him if he thought we were headed for another Depression and he said no, but he said he thought we needed to seriously tighten our financial belts. Because we don’t have any savings, and if he lost his job, we would be screwed.

Starting today, I’m going to be cancelling every expenditure we don’t need. I pay for Weight Watchers Online- don’t need it, there are ways to get Weight Watchers recipes and info for free. If I need a structured plan, there’s always SparkPeople which is miraculously still free to use. I don’t need a monthly membership to Blockbuster Online-I get a lot of new releases free to review, and we rarely use the membership anyway. I already cancelled the “pro” membership I was paying StatCounter, since I can find stats through Woopra and Google Analytics. There’s another $9.00 a month.

I’m not getting any magazines delivered anymore, which for a self-proclaimed magazine junkie like myself is hard to give up, but it all adds up. We aren’t buying any school photos this Fall, what the heck is up with that anyway? Now they want you to buy portrait packages twice a year and pay for a Fall Yearbook? School pictures and yearbooks are for the end of the year. Period. I’m also not buying any cheap wrapping paper or $8.00 boxes of chocolate with 5 pieces inside. I hate school fundraising because the stuff for sale is always such junk.

Ryan’s 12th birthday is Thursday. It’s costing me $30.00 for cider and donuts for him to pass out to his class and teachers that morning, which is a ridiculously large amount of money but that and a trip to play Laser Tag for him and three friends is his gift this year. He wants to buy the new “Fable” game but it’s going to have to wait unless I can get a freelance writing job in the next few days that pays immediately.

Ryan needs jeans and pants. Kaitlyn needs everything because we finally went through all the clothes that my blog friends with older girls sent me. The kids are going to all need snow boots and jackets this year. Which is why there is no money for things like diet plans and magazines. And with as much determination as I can, I have to start putting money in a savings account, at least two months’ worth.

I might be over-reacting, and I hope I am. But having money put aside just in case and learning how to stretch the budget is helpful no matter what’s happening with the economy. I can’t control the economy of the country, but I can control the economy of my family, and that’s better than nothing.

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