Thinking back on the month of April..........

Financially it was a flipping expensive month what with a new car, and a new driveway, plus nearly $1,400 spent on car repair bills, plus we had to fill up the furnace oil tank.


I am hoping May is a cheap month for us, mind you I am touching wood as I write that!!!   A couple of good things money wise, I did manage to stay under budget with my grocery totals for the month of April.  I spent $298.99 for the month with $78.12 in savings.  There is a good deal on until Thursday for free milk at some of the Loblaws chain of stores.  Milk is on for $1 a carton and here is a link for a $1 off coupon, making it free.  I am in for $300 total again in groceries, paper products, cleaning products and personal products for the month of May.


I achieved another mini goal with Swagbucks.  I cashed in enough points for $25 in Amazon e-cards, and have enough swagbucks as of the end of April for six $5 Amazon e-cards.  As of the end of April I have enough swagbucks for 6 $5 Amazon e-cards, but can only cash in 5 per month.  I am stocking up on Swagbucks so that when I get too busy I will still have enough to cash in for 5 $5 e-cards per month.


I was able to order my soil for the garden using the money I had saved up in my loonie and toonie pot.  Still putting money into our sealed pot, can't wait until December to see how much we managed to save.


I managed to get some more gardening and grass cutting down on Monday before it started raining.  We have a couple of Willow Trees in the garden and they are so messy always dropping their branches.  So I had to clear all those before I could cut more grass.  The end result though looks not too bad:

I am hoping to get some more weeding done this morning, weather permitting.


How are you getting on with your garden?

Updates on a couple of things.......

Molly, we still haven't got a friend for Molly yet, and with the ways things are money wise, it's been put on hold.  Her allergies are really bad at the moment, so we may have to increase her steroids yet, which will cost more money.  I am holding off taking her to the vet for blood work until May, as there is no more money in the pot for anything else this month.


50 + 1 Recipes: I have been made aware there are a lot of recipes on the posts that are taking you too ads, or no longer exist.  I will go through them when I have a few hours to spare, namely on a night when I sit down to watch TV, however I won't be doing that over the next couple of days as we have run into a problem, which brings us up to my next update:


Driveway: Looks gorgeous and still very pleased with it.................BUT..........weeds are coming through to the surface????  So the guy popped by to take a look and has told us to put weed killer on it and they will come back and put another layer of tar and chippings on it.  These weeds are not just on the side, which I expected but in the middle of the driveway.  So I am going to be busy with that.


Called both garages to see if I can get a partial refund on the repairs that were done on my old car, still haven't heard anything back from them. Will give them until the end of the week and call the first garage again in Barrie.  The other one I won't follow up on, as that is where I bought my new car from.


I went and left a CD in the CD player in my old car, so called them and asked them if they could take it out for me.  You'll never guess what CD it was...................Meatloaf, "Hang Cool Teddy Bear."  The guy at the garage just laughed, and said his mother was a fan also.  I think he thought I was more of a classical music type of woman.


This poor birdie was a tad dazed when it flew into our window:



It's a Northern Flicker, and quite a beauty.  The good thing it did fly off when I got closer to it.

Say hello to Betsy.......

Why Betsy, well her license plate starts with a "B" so that seemed like a good name.


Glad I took a photo of her now, as she will never look this clean ever again........I am hopeless at washing cars and it's very low on the list of my priorities.


I spoke to both garages regarding refunds on my repairs and both have to get back to me.  At this point anything will be better than nothing as far as I am concerned..


I don't have snow tires for the new car, so I will have to sell my snow tires from the old car in October and hopefully that will pay for at least half of the new ones.


All in all I am pretty happy with it so far.......

My twitching eye...........

My eye is twitching, I feel as though I am winking at everyone.  Also my head is pounding.  I have a bad case of stress at the moment............however I think things should settle down soon.

Firstly my car, drove it out of the garage on Thursday only for it to break down again.....yep it truly did.........dh nearly ran into the back of me.  However at that point we had already decided to purchase a new car, as the garage gave us a decent price for my old one.  We go and pick up a 2012 Ford Fiesta SE Hatchback on Tuesday.  It's in black and has a few bells and whistles I will never use, but we got a good deal on it, so decided to take it.  I should see a huge difference in my gas/petrol bills, I hope.  It is costing us an extra $10 a month in insurance, but can't do anything about that.  Luckily there is 0% financing as money is pretty tight at the moment, but we should be able to make this work.  Also we 0% financing, it's not like it is costing us extra money in interest.

What I do know is that my old car in unreliable and not safe for me to drive.  So the garage was good enough to lend me a car to tide me over until Tuesday.........a Ford Taurus.........the keys had better not stop working in it.

In between hands we committed to having the driveway tar and chipped.  This was money we could have done without spending.  However the results are awesome and has made a huge difference:

I personally had never heard of tar and chip.  It is more commonly used in the countryside and what they do is level out your driveway.  Spread a layer of tar over it, then a layer of chippings, which are sort of like pea gravel, then take a roller over it.  Spread another layer of tar and then chippings, and roll it again.  There is no maintenance to this and should last quite a while.

To tarmac/asphalt our driveway would have cost $21,000 and we would have never been able to afford that. 

So my head has been pounding over spending this money for the driveway and my car breaking down all at the same time.  We are in a huge belt tightening mode now, so I'm afraid don't come to me looking to borrow money...........we don't have any!!!!