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Archive for August, 2014

Mower Repair & Pre-Sale Gym Membership

August 17th, 2014 at 11:59 pm

Our lawnmower wouldn't stay running. DH had to take it the repair shop. He picked it up this last week. $146 for a new carburetor. Ouch!
We were told that to prevent this from being a problem in the future we cannot use "cheap gas". (Who knew?)
It was recommended that we only use Chevron Supreme in the mower.
(I hope that helps any other mower owners out there.)

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A new health club is being built in our city. They are running a pre-sale special that has the rates about 50% less than regular.

DH really wants to get back into the gym again. Unfortunately this club doesn't offer racquetball (for the sake of his knees maybe that's not such a bad thing).

The cost for our entire family with the special rate is less than the single member rate at the club we had used previously. And the special rate is locked for the length of the membership. If me or the kids end up not using the club we can suspend the additional memberships (me, DD, DS) and reactivate later still keeping the promo rate. At the minimum we can get DH in there working out a few times per week and squeeze $35/month into the budget. We can cancel anytime without fees, so we felt like there wasn't any risk to giving it a try.

My Friday - Spending & Making Money

August 9th, 2014 at 07:20 am

Spending.
We got new tires for the Pathfinder.
It had been three years and three months since the last tire replacement and at least 70k miles. They were really worn, to the point that I was worrying about driving too far on them.
Four new tires, an alignment and taxes/fees came to $960.

Making.
I redeemed my Wells Fargo AmEx points for cash into our checking account. That was $550! Big Grin

I made $60 for pet sitting this weekend.

Won $25 cash prize at a veterinary technician meeting this evening.

And I booked a pet sitting job coming up soon that will pay $400.

Housing Market - Bubble 2.0?

August 6th, 2014 at 02:22 am

I enjoy looking at the real estate market for our area. The prices here have been climbing and the time houses are on the market has been getting shorter. It's a hot market right now.

I haven't seen a single family home available for less than $300k in awhile. Most condos are in the $200k to $350k range.

Average days on market is about a month.

A house on our street was getting cleaned up all last month. I was waiting to see if it was going up for sale. Well, it was listed on July 29th and it is in contract already. In fact, I saw a home inspection truck in the driveway today. WOW! That was fast!
I am really interested to see what the final price is when it sells.


Here are some interesting snips I thought would be good to share:


This is our home's value per Zillow's estimate.



Here is a recently sold home near us with the same square footage. (I think the 4th bedroom is in the garage.)



This is a fun one.
40 years = 2000% increase in value!



Okay, this house has an interesting price history.
It looks to me that maybe the owner cashed out some equity because it went to foreclosure.
Then it was bought at auction. And they turned right around and sold it for $109,600 more.
I saw the pictures - it was not fixed up at all. Just average house/neighborhood!




This one is a good snapshot of how the prices are nearly the same as the "bubble" prices of 2005/2006.
You can see here the "bubble" was building - look at the nearly 40% price increase from 2004 to 2005.



Any interesting things going on with RE in your area?