Well today was a big day! I received a phone call from a Consumer’s Energy representative (and she was really nice and very easy to work with!) from some special department. She received the grievance I filed with Michigan.gov and although I still have to pay the bill she did reduce it by 25% for me! On a $769.00 bill 25% is quite a difference! It ended up only being $551.00 something. I still don’t entirely agree with it (even though I do understand that I have been using more energy than what was being registered on the meter) but Mrs. Ridley (or however you spell it) took the time to explain the situation to me and just simply at least act like she cared how frustrated, upset and mad I was. She said she didn’t like the fact that it had to come to me filing a grievance against the company but she understands why I did. Ok so that’s still a huge financial obligation but thanks to my awesome WAHM community it’s not a problem to pay it Thank you everyone so much!!!

Alright onto the car situation. About three week’s ago now, maybe it’s been one month, I purchased a car for $1200.00 cash ($1300.00 by the time he did the title transfer and taxes) and took it back to the gentleman the very next day because of some weird humming noise it made. Well it didn’t get me very far taking it back to him. I had it looked at by someone and they said they didn’t think there was anything wrong with it other than the tires making a humming noise when I was driving down the road. But there has just been this nagging feeling in the pit of my stomach that there WAS something wrong so I decided to take it to another place in town and pay $20.00 to have them look it over.

Hmmm kind of funny how that $20 is now turning into a $300.00 bill (but again thank you to the WAHM community I HAVE the money to pay to have the car fixed!) and how a $1200.00 car is turning into a $1500.00!!! So the diagnosis of the car? A ball bearing (or ball joint – something like that & it will be $200 to have it replaced and that includes the labor). The other diagnosis? A separated rear passenger tire and what that means (because I totally had to ask because it was Foreign language to me!) is that there are metal rings (or something) in your tires for them to hold their shape and keep them round. Well the metal rings in my tire have separated causing the tire to lose it’s shape which is causing the pulling to the right and weird shaking I feel when I slow down so therefore I have to have a new tire put on also (which is costing $60 some dollars). So the grand total for tomorrows repair bill will be right around $260-280 something…go figure. LOL.

I also just put $48.00 into my car yesterday for an oil change and some sort of engine type flush thing. But it was promising to hear that they were impressed with how there were no oil leaks, antifreeze leaks or anything of the sort on my car. They said for a 95 wth 122,000 and something miles the engine is in excellent shape and must of been very well kept by the previous owner! They also said that if I maintained the car well (keeping up on oil changes, etc) that I could definitely get another 100,000 miles out of it! Yeah that made my heart happy

So I’ll be right back at sitting broke (well just about broke) by Noon tomorrow when I go pick my car up and pay that bill but it’s all good! It’s been such a blessing to have the money to take care of things!