Call Before You Pay (Janssen)

I have a secret theory that some companies send out bills without a lot of detail or add on extra charges, hoping that you'll pay them without noticing or bothering to find out what exactly you're paying.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend asked me how much we'd paid out of pocket for our daughter's birth. I told her (probably with no small degree of smugness) that it'd been completely covered by insurance.

Then, of course, THAT AFTERNOON I walked to the mailbox and pulled out a bill from the hospital for the sum of $700. My baby was eight months old! What could I possibly owe? Also, goodbye tax return.

I went home and called the hospital to ask what this $700 bill was for (you might have guessed that the bill made no mention of WHAT I might owe $700 for, just that I owed it and ought to pay it quickly before it went to collections).

They told me that $200 of it was my co-pay and $500 was my co-insurance. (I have no idea what co-insurance is). They did rush to assure me that the insurance company had already paid $15,000 for her birth, and had only bumped back this very small $700 charge. This did not make me feel better.

I felt certain that everything we'd read about the health insurance plan insisted that a birth would be completely covered and there would be no copay at all. So I called my health insurance company and asked how come they hadn't paid it.

The answer? They'd listed my delivery as being out of network. Was it? Of course not, and as soon as they looked up the hospital where she was born and my plan, it was clear that she was born right smack in the middle of the network and that I certainly did not owe $700 and they would cover it.

But if I hadn't called, I would never have known, and I also would have been $700 poorer. On Monday, I got a form from the insurance company indicating that they had increased the amount they paid and I now owed nothing.

If I wasn't already convinced that you shouldn't call about any bills you think you don't owe, I certainly am now.

Saving on Tolietries and Household Items (Janssen)

I count household and toiletry items as part of my grocery budget, which means every time I have to buy laundry detergent, there is less money for me to spend on cheeeeeeese or other equally delicious things (what a lie - there is nothing as equally delicious as cheese).

I think the truly cheapest way to get household items like toilet paper and shampoo is probably through drugstore deals. I subscribe to Common Sense with Money and they have weekly posts about the deals at Walgreens, CVS, and Rite Aid (not to mention Wal-Mart and Target). But 1) I don't take the newspaper and you usually really need those coupons in order to rack up your savings and 2) the idea of going to the drugstore on TOP of regular grocery shopping and then trying to keep track of my Register Rewards and CVS Extra Care Bucks without letting them expire overwhelms me. If you are willing to put in the effort there, though, you really can save a ton of money.

For me, the happy medium is Soap.com. I was wary until I made my first order a few weeks ago when Bart needed new razors and the idea of making a special trip to Sam's Club made me want to weep softly into the carpet. But buying razors at the grocery store makes my soul shrivel up and die a little because I might as well just flush dollar bills away.

And for many household items, I'm not usually willing to go with a generic version because they simply don't work as well (the difference between Tide and the $2 bottle of detergent? night and day for me. And my husband hates any deodorant that is not Old Spice).

Everything on Soap.com is pretty reasonably priced (the Mach 3 razors, for instance, were cheaper per blade than if I'd bought them at Sam's Club), and they often have digital coupons that you just click and they'll take off anywhere up to $3 off. Brilliant.

Shipping is free if you spend over $39 (which thrills my husband because it means I will actually stock up a bit on things he lives in fear of running out of).  And if you aren't happy with something, you can send it back for free too.

AND, if you have coupons for items, they send you some postage-paid envelopes with your order that you can stick your coupons in and mail back to them and they'll post them to your account (you have to send them in at least a week before they expire) and you can apply them to your next order. I love it.

There are almost always coupon codes so that you can $10 off or 20% off your entire order, etc. If you use the code FRUGALWIFE when you check out, you can get 20% off your first order.

AND (I know, it just keeps going), if you go through Ebates first, you can get up to 5% back in cash.

I tell you, when that box of deodorant, razors, lotion, and Draino (yes, envy my glamorous life) just showed up on my doorstep, without me having to leave the house or drag my baby out with me, it was pretty much the greatest thing ever. That UPS man probably thinks I have a very sad existence.

Seriously, I am completely sold (just ask my mom, who had to listen to me talk on and on about this on the phone the day after my box arrived).

Hobbies That Don't Break the Bank

Carole:

• Practicing the piano
• Crocheting or knitting
• Decorating on a shoe string – $20 for paint, fabric for pillows or curtains on sale for cheap, cheap, cheap
• Gardening (start with seeds) 
• Hiking 
• Bike Riding 
• Blogging 
• Writing in a diary
• Volunteering
• Book club 
• Couponing 
• Writing  your epic novel 
• Touring model homes 
• Playing cards with your family 
• Embroidery or cross stitch 
• Upholstery 
• Refinishing furniture 
• Singing in a choir 
• Community theater 
• Baking breads or other things 
• Organizing areas in your life 
• Sunbathing 
• Swimming

Janssen

• Cooking dinner (am I the only person who generally enjoys making dinner?)
• Making lists (I love lists - books I want to read, recipes I want to try, places to visit)
• Free museum days
• Trying new restaurants with Groupon certificates
• Checking out cookbooks and decorating books from the library
• Maintaining a little herb garden on my balcony
• Reading magazines (from the library - I could not afford my magazine habits otherwise)
• Getting the mail and sorting it immediately (I don't know what sad things it says about me that this has been the highlight of my day for years).
• Craft group (Kayla gave me this idea - you get together every few weeks and every one works on their own project)
• Dessert nights (much cheaper and easier than having people over for dinner. Plus, you aren't staring an entire cake down with only two mouths in the house)
• Checking out TV show seasons from the library (Friday Night Lights was a recent favorite)

Merrick

• Go on a walk -- the summer is upon us, and what better way to relax than take a stroll in the sunshine? I've been going on daily walks/jogs with one of my good friends. We push our strollers and catch up on each others lives! 
• Go to the library -- find a good book, a quiet corner, and dive in. So much better than spending $15 on a book that you may never want to read again. 
• Crafting -- doing something with my hands always relaxes me (one of the many reasons I paint!). Crafting can be expensive if you get carried away with it, but with my box of scrap fabrics, I can embellish a old tshirt or make a headband for pennies!
• Rent a movie -- after a long week, this is one of Philip and my favorite ways to relax. With a $1 movie from the redbox, you can't get a much cheaper date than that!
• House Hunting -- from the early days of our marriage, Philip and I have loved driving around and looking at houses. We mostly drive through high end neighborhoods, admiring the beautiful landscaping, scoffing at the gaudy architecture, or swooning at the beautiful stonework. Since they're so out of our price range, it doesn't depress us that we don't own a nice house like that -- it just inspires us to do beautiful things with the tiny space that we currently have! 

What hobbies do you have that aren't too expensive? 

Do You Use a Credit Card? (Janssen)

Some people (including financial gurus) are extremely anti-credit card. And I get that. It's easy to spend money you don't really have, the interest rates are killer, and the minimum payments mean you could be still paying for your gallon of 2% years from now.

But . . . we use a credit card.

Bart had one when we got married and had never once carried a balance on it. I'd never been a credit card user previously.

Five years later, I can tell you that a credit card works well for us. I like the security of a credit card (if your cash gets stolen or accidentally thrown away or lost, you're just out of luck - not so with a credit card). I like that I can account for every penny spent on it by checking my online statement rather than thinking "didn't I have a $20 in here yesterday?"

I know, also, that this is fairly uncommon, but it's HARDER for me to spend with a credit card than it is with cash. With cash, I have no paper trail - I can pay and be done. With a credit card, not only do I have to think about my purchase when I make it, but I have to think about it again every single time I look at the statement and then when I pay it (can you tell I look at our statement many times a month?).

We have a Southwest credit card and we put absolutely everything on it - gas, groceries, our cell phone bill, the internet bill. If I could pay our rent on it, I would (well, technically, I believe I can but it would be $25 a month, so that clearly would be a bad call). We get probably two free round-trip tickets a year on it, which definitely makes it worth the $59 fee to us (I called to see if they'd waive it. They would not).

For us, it works.

What about you? Do you use a credit card? Avoid them like the plague?