Turkey Day

Last week I bought a huge frozen Butterball turkey to enjoy on Thanksgiving. We took it out of the freezer and put it into the refrigerator to defrost 3 days ago. It is still as hard as a rock and I guess we will have to soak it in the kitchen sink or figure out how to use the microwave to finish thawing it out before we pop it in the oven today. I think the turkey is too big to even fit into the microwave. This will be an interesting problem to solve, with physics and logistic coming into play.

Looks like dinner will be in the evening rather than late afternoon as originally planned. LOL

Wonder why the leaves are not turning the bright fall colors that we’ve come to expect this time of year? It seems like the leaves are going straight from green to brown. The yard is already full of large brown oak leaves and smaller brown hickory leaves. I don’t mind raking these leaves in an afternoon, but when the burr balls start to fall from the hickory trees, I will be gathering them up with a vengeance. The burr balls are a nuisance and cause twisted ankles as well as puncturing the soft pads of my dog’s feet.

Wrecking Their Credit

My sister’s husband was in a car wreck back in March and hasn’t worked since. He hurt his back and has been back and forth to all kinds of different doctors. It’s bad enough that his car was totaled and he can’t afford a new one, but he’s in pain every time he does the least little bit of lifting or carrying or pulling on things. We figure the car insurance will help take care of most of these kinds of things. What worries my sister and me is that he’s not earning any income all this time and the household bills are piling up.

Sis had to come out of retirement and go back to work just to bring in some money and pay the basics, like food and the utilities. But the rest of the bills are getting harder and harder to put off. I’ve helped her out a little here and there, but they are going to need a lot more help than what I can give.

She finally started looking into debt consolidation and counseling, and I’m sure the possibility of filinf for bankruptcy is in the back of her mind, too. There’s a wide difference in the types of debt relief services and I want her to make informed decisions about this important financial matters. It’s bad enough that we are in a tough economy, but with her husband hurt and her two sons in college, she has a lot of worries.

What she might do is refinance her house and use the equity in it to consolidate debt and come up with a schedule to pay off the important bills. But there’s a chance that the real estate market being in the tank will limit how much she can borrow against the house. So she’s busy talking with a real estate attorney and her bank this week.

Cross your fingers that this will all work out for her and her family. Obviously this car wreck has done more than just wreck their car and hurt her husband. It’s wrecking their credit, too. I’m sure the credit will work itself out with some help from the right people. I hope her husband gets healed up and can go back to a normal life sometime this year, too.

Fresh Look at Credit Cards

With September just around the corner, I took a look at my budget and tax situation and wanted to get a feel for where I’ll stand at the end of the year. I’m due for my performance review and raise next month and I’m pretty sure I’m on track to buy a new house after the first of the year. Of course, a lot depends upon the economy and whether the price of gas has leveled off or if it is going to keep rising over the next several months.

Part of my strategy for buying the new house depends on the work I’ve been doing on my credit report. I met with a loan officer and talked about what I need to do to have a good rating and we made a plan that I’ve been working on all summer. According to the loan officer, I need 5 open lines of credit and all of them need to be paid down to less than half of the credit limit or loan amounts.

For that to work, I need two more credit cards and I’m applying for them now. I found a web site called Smart Credit Choices that has information on all the major credit cards and I can sort through the different options, like 0 balance transfers to find the cards with terms that I need.

One of the attractive offers is for a0 APR balance transfer. I’ve seen commercials for those and they promise 0% APR for up to one year. However, after reading the information on this site, I find out that most of them offer the 0% for only 3 months, or possibly 6 months. That is still technically “up to” one year but it’s not the full one year that most people would expect from hearing that commercial.

But I did find a Discover Card that offers no fee balance transfers and 0% interest for one full year. This card also offers cash back on purchases. That’s the one I’m going after and there was a link right there on the Smart Choices website that takes me tot he Discover Card site to put in my application online.

I Spy

One of the guys at the warehouse works for us part time and for his other job he works security for a chain of local convenience stores. I gave him a call tonight and told about my concerns in the neighborhood and he suggested I put a couple cameras on the exterior doors and the driveway. He has a bunch of that kind of technical stuff in his garage and he’s going to bring some of it with him tonight to let me borrow the cameras and controllers. He says they are easy to mount and are wireless, so I can have them up tomorrow in just a few minutes. They run the video feed to a regular CD or DVD player or to a personal computer. So I can record any activity and have a record of it to show the police. This is cool – I’m totally up for this little spy game.