UPDATE: Have a Quandry, Part II

Earlier today I posted this post Have a Quandry  and I got a wide variety of responses from both Facebook and here on my blog – some suggested  changing our Internet/Phone carrier

“have you consider no contract phone like simple talk & virgin mobile? i have virgin mobile which i pays $38.11 per month. mostly use text and data usage.”

“ Anyway, your AT&T bill is quite high for Internet and landline. I cut my landline cause it was costing me $45.00 per month.”

“ I agree that AT&T bill is high. We pay Verizon the same as what your paying and we have cable. That’s without the special price we had when we signed up. My bill is $160 with tax for cable, high speed internet, and a landline. Talk to them about any specials that can lower your bill or change providers.”

“either way, the most important is finding a way to reduce cost. i have verizon fios internet & digital tv: $86.00. since you are loyalty customer, i am sure at & t will work something out.”

And maybe seeing if either CFPUA or AT&T would work with us – as predicted CFPUA was like “go away, you’re on your own” as predicted – they are a monopoly and no one has ANY control over them…so we have to pay that in full or they’ll shut our water off (not like we can’t just go turn it back on as needed, the cover to the switch isn’t locked)…and we’ll end up paying a reconnect fee of $55.00 – so after some discussion w/my hubby we decided to do two things:

1.  We are cutting back our grocery budget from $200 to $150.00 for the next two weeks to free up $100.00 to put towards AT&T.  We’re going to employ his employee discount coupon for either Sadie or Nixon’s food (same brand, one coupon, one bag) to get $10.00/off a bag of their food which’ll allow us to put that money back into the grocery budget.

2.  We split up the payments to AT&T into two, one $100.00 payment this Friday the 16th and one $50.10 scheduled for the 23rd.

This will prevent us from having our service interrupted and will allow us to also pay our after school care.

My hubby didn’t like the fact that our car insurance premium went up by almost double – so he’s called the insurance company and someone at our agent’s office said it didn’t look right – she was digging into it – she said it should have only gone up by a little bit, when they quoted me it was going to be something around $80.00 odd dollars NOT $128.00/mos…so we’re on hold with that situation – if that’s the case and it’s only $80.00/mos then we’ll have that $40.00 to put back into the Grocery budget.

So how did we encounter this situation?

Simple

The same way we ALWAYS do – we dared to go out of town and I lost something like 17 hours of pay over the course of two weeks – so that drastically cut into our income…thus the reason for the email to my HR Team I sent last week.  To which I am still waiting on a response, they are investigating it and should have an answer for me later this week *crossing my fingers its good news*

So that’s where I’m at right now!