Yea

$25 from Olay ProX, from a sale/coupon/rebate offer plus another rebate last month. There's another rebate for $25 this month, but I haven't decided if I'm going to use the last rebate to buy more and get the new rebate. It's pretty expensive, even after all the discounts.

Also a booklet of $1 coupons from General Mills. But no ads! I can't shop without seeing what's on sale. So, it may just be another no shop week.

The rest of the day was spent CONTINUING to deal with the phone/internet company on the new contract. They just CAN'T seem to get it right. But they have managed to roll all the old bills together, so we can see what we were paying all combined, and YIKES! I'm so glad I'm getting back in the habit of reviewing these things.

I spent the morning with DH estimating our monthly expenses from last years bills. WOW. Then I spent time removing services and miscellanceous charges, like magazines we had on a trial basis before my accident and somehow got renewed at full (outrageous) prices. Then shopping, with good savings, and now I'm running late to physical therapy.

I'll detail the findings later, but WOW, we found some HUGE savings by making a few phone calls. And unfortunately some that will take awhile to figure out.

I have been trying to deal with my cell phone provider by phone or email, which sounds logical, but HAH it's not.

So I finally made it down to their store with DH (don't even ask, but two phones requires both of us). I've had the same provider for 15 years, back when Corporate paid the bills. I changed plans a few years ago, and hadn't really noticed that after the contract was up I didn't renegotiate a new contract, and the charges started moving way up. It was up to $70 a month for the two phones, which we really didn't need. I mean, yes, we used them, but NEED did not equal $70 a month.

We went for a prepaid pay-as-you-go, with 99c only on days it's used, and no minute charges for family members. We stayed with the same provider, so kept our activations etc, and the annual savings will be around $750 - $850!

The other problem with our current plan had been that the same provider was our internet provider, but not the line provider and local and long distance were separate, and there were little charges all over the place. I went nuts trying to track some of them down, but our DSL/internet/local calls/long distance was over $150 a month, and quite a bit was miscellaneous little charges that made no sense to me or DH.

We bundled all the services together into one bill, at $59 a month, still high but unlimited local and long distance and high speed DSL, lots of features, and -- -- I got them to agree to clean up the mess of all the weird little charges. One simple bill and plan.

I also had to clean up AOL charges, which were supposed to be "free", but I hadn't quite realized that when my sister set up an account while she was staying here, she didn't cross over to the free account, and it was still linked to ours, and AOL had linked their charges into our phone company local provider and also into our long distance provider AND also into our DSL provider. Getting that cleaned up is still in progress.

Still, a good savings day.

I'm still working out the budget, trying to decrease these "line items" while figuring out the actual costs we have. One day at a time