I was given a $10 Kohl's cash coupon last week when DD and I stopped in to buy her some socks and a new pair of jeans. Last night I used it and bought myself a six pack of socks and DH a six pack of socks all for $11. I am proud that I used the coupon for a need and not the other things I saw that I wanted.

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My check engine light came on again last week. Today I stopped in at the mechanic and thankfully it just had to do with a burnt fuse. Hopefully it won't happen again or it might mean an electrical problem. Our mechanic took about 20 minutes checking everything over and didn't charge me anything! Yay! I was happy about that; last month he got $1796 from us.

Just perusing Zillow because I've seen several houses "moved into" recently. There have been two on our street, both foreclosures.
One three doors down for $225k on July 15.
The second at the other end of street for $219k on July 27.
Both sold for lower than we paid and much lower than other houses on our street sold in the past year.

Not so good for our house value. *sigh*
Zillow has our estimated value at the lowest it's ever been. I know it's not really important except on a certain emotional level. Thankfully we don't need to sell. It's just I had a more positive feeling when our house had more value.

On the flip side there are still $800k to $1M+ houses that have recently sold in our zip code. (I don't think the upper end has lost much ground??)

Anybody else looking at Zillow for your area?

Only after DH made a trip into Staples and had a long discussion with the Asst. Manager and Manager did they get moving on providing us with a solution to our laptop issues. It took until last week, but they gave us $300 worth of store credit. Basically what we've paid the past 10 months in repairs plus a little more. Our new laptop is a Toshiba and was on sale; we paid $140 total. I was pretty pleased with that. DH did remind me that we had really paid full price, we just did it over time.


I am feeling stressed about money, bills, wants, needs. *sigh* Hoping that now that DD is back in school and summer is "over" we can fall back into a more normal routine. Plus, having a computer again will help with my budgeting. Still, just feeling like so much is out of reach...

On a positive note:
I did read all the Song of Ice and Fire(Game of Thrones) books while we didn't have internet in the house.
Such a good read! I'm looking so forward to the new season on HBO and the next two books.

Hoping everyone here is well. I will try to do some catching up tonight.