Yesterday was a rainy day, so a trip to the Children’s Museum was in order. Frugal Boy is old enough now that he would actually enjoy it and not put every single toy in his mouth. Our museum offers memberships for $95 that give unlimited visits for the entire family for 1 year. That isn’t a bad price considering a daily ticket is $7 per person two and older. We splurged and got the membership plus level for $130. The extra cost includes one free guest pass for each visit and access to the ACM reciprocal network.
Now we have 12 months to get another $109 worth of value out of our memberships. It should be good motivation to get out of the house and go places.
PSA: I recently changed the comment captcha so if you weren’t able to comment before you may be able to do so now.
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The weather outside has been delightful! Yesterday we basked in 67° and soaked up as much outside time as we could with a trip to Sugar Grove Nature Center.
There is an abundance of trails that ramble through the prairie and woods around the nature center and we picked a shorter 1/3 mile loop that we thought Frugal Boy could complete on his own.
I was a little worried when he fell down for the first time and got his hands dirty. I wasn’t worried that he fell or his hands where dirty, but that he was insistent that we clean them off. Of course we said no, and told him to buck up. A little while later and he had remembered how to little boy. Whew!
The trail meandered through the woods and even had a bridge at one point. Near the end it opened back out to prairie and Frugal Boy was starting to whine, then cry. He forgot about his tired little legs when we made it to the playground. It was unlike any playground he had been to before!
This was a nature playground where kids can be kids.
and big kids can be big kids.
Frugal Boy had completely forgotten about staying clean. So it was a big success.
Later on a bunch of other kids came and Frugal Boy made some new friends. He is a very loving and caring little boy, but it still grossed me out when he kissed a stranger toddler girl on the lips. Twice.
Yowza! Where did the time go?! Last weekend we visited Santa and that involved getting dressed up in actual clothes (something of an obscurity in these parts).
Frugal Boy wasn’t entirely thrilled with the idea, but I thought he looked mighty handsome.
While we waited in line for Santa I tried to get him excited. I explained what the other boys and girls were doing. “He’s sitting in Santa’s lap”, “She’s telling Santa what a good girl she’s been.” Ever since the yard decorations have started going up around town Frugal Boy has been on a Santa babble. I thought there might be hope for a great photo this year.
Hmmm… He’s not too sure about this. Maybe if we had let him wear his snow boots like he wanted he would have felt better about the whole situation.
Shae got a couple of photos before it turned into a “SAVE ME DADA”.
Oh well. The whole process is rather creepy. Hey, go sit on that strangers lap while everyone looks at you and takes pictures. There was another pair of parents with a similar aged girl and she noped right out of there.
We took a few more photos with the props, but we could tell his heart wasn’t in it, so we called it a morning.
A week later, this afternoon, his Christmas present arrived in the mail. He has been glued to the Duplo block table that we built him a month ago.
Duplo is the Lego brand building block for ages 1.5-5. They are compatible with the smaller Lego pieces and unsurprising are expensive. I used to think that Lego was expensive, but Duplo is even worse! At retail, it costs about $1 per block! ¡Aye caramba!
With a little shopping though, it is possible to find good deals on building sets. I purchased a 123 piece lot from eBay for $20 with shipping. That comes to about 16¢/block.
If you have the patience you could also find good deals at yard sales or on your local Craigslist. Finally, if you are concerned about the cleanliness of used bricks, you can put them in a mesh bag in the top rack of the dishwasher. Just make sure not to use high heat otherwise you might melt them!
I wrote exactly one month ago about how we had paid off our mortgage (see here). Simply sending in the last payment to a mortgage is not enough however. To truly be finished with a loan, whether that be a student loan or a mortgage, you need the paperwork to back it up. For mortgages, that comes in the flavor of a Release from Mortgage. Basically the lender says, “Yup, they done paid in full” except in writing and usually in a more educated manner.
That piece of paper does more than just give you a warm fuzzy feely. When it comes time to sell your house, the buyer is going to want proof that no one else has a legitimate claim to the property. A mortgage after all is just a secured loan, with the security being the property. So I took that nicely worded piece of notarized legalese and went down to our county clerk/recorder’s office to have it filed for $33. The clerk/recorder’s office keeps a record of all property deeds, mortgages, liens, and foreclosures. These public records are commonly available online for easy searching. It makes it very easy to research properties and also to be very nosy. 😉
Anyway, we now officially own the deed to our house free and clear. No other parties have any legitimate claim on it and the process of selling will be slightly simpler.
screenshot from county recorder’s website
Shae’s name is on the deed. I don’t know why it isn’t listed on the Grantees list, but it is where it counts.
It is a rhetorical question because savvy reader, we already know the answer. I was listening to the radio this morning while driving Frugal Boy to the babysitters when an ad came on. It was for a local credit union advertising their “Lifestyle Loans”. Wow, how thoughtful of them to lend some money right before Christmas time. I turned up the volume because I knew this was going to be rich. After hearing the terms and conditions I made a mental reminder to look up the offer online when I got home.
Here is what their website had to say.
Lifestyle loans can be up to $20,000 at a *low*, *low* rate of only 9.5%. The term is maxed out at 36 months. If those terms aren’t *good* enough for you, they are also nice enough to throw in a %1 cash back on the amount you take out (e.g. $200 on a $20,000 loan).
Using a simple loan calculator, I can see that a $20,000 loan at 9.5% for 36 months will have a monthly payment of $640.66 and cost $3,063.72 in interest over three years.
If you factor in the 1% immediate cash bonus and applied that against the interest the “real” loan rate would be about 8.9%, an absolutely abysmal rate.
Out of their proposed list of items and services I only see a handful that might qualify for taking on a shark type loan. Even then you could probably work out a payment plan with a funeral home, HVAC company, or hospital that would be cheaper than a 9.5% loan.
Anyway, I just had to stand up on my soapbox. This is a local credit union that sells a crappy product to people in our community. Obviously people gobble it up because they just NEED golf carts, cosmetic surgery, or honeymoons. Christmas isn’t about those things, and people don’t need to take out loans for Christmas.
