Penny Pinching Mom

Lowe’s Gift Card Giveaway

Attention fellow bloggers: How would you like a chance to win a $25 Lowe’s gift card? It would be great for getting your dad or husband a Father’s Day gift, or just for buying stuff for the house! How, you ask? Here are the details:

In My Bag is giving away a $25 Lowes gift card! Participating in the contest is as easy as creating a blog entry that links to the contest. For more information, see the official contest blog entry: Win a Lowes gift card!

Learning By Writing

As a web content writer, I write about a lot of different stuff. I’ve been doing a lot of writing about pets and women’s issues lately. Those are things that I have a reasonable amount of knowledge about. But sometimes I really get thrown a curveball.

Last week, for example, I was assigned a case study. I had hardly even looked at one, much less written one. But I looked up some samples, and then I gave it my best shot. I was expecting to end up doing a rewrite, but as it turned out the client was very pleased.

Now I have to work on some crafting articles, which I know precious little about. The extent of my crafting experience is pretty much what I did in high school home ec class. I did some plastic canvas, cross-stitching, and sewed some stuffed animals. I did a little plastic canvas on my own, but other than that I have hardly crafted since. This should be about as interesting as me trying to write tips for selecting New York movers. (In case I haven’t mentioned it, I live in North Carolina and have only visited New York once.)

I can do it. I have faith in myself. I just hope I can get them done reasonably quickly so I can move on to the other work I’ve got lined up.

So Much Insurance, So Little Money

I spoke to the insurance guy last week, and he said that all of the life insurance we applied for had gone through. That’s great, but I think we’re going to have to lower the coverage. Money is very tight right now, and as much as I want to have life insurance, it’s not really a necessity. I’m hoping we can afford at least a little, though. He is supposed to come over and talk to us about it once he gets all the paperwork back from the company.

As it turns out, he is going to be able to save us some money on our car insurance. So we’ll probably be switching it over to his company when it comes time to renew. He also wanted to talk to us about North Carolina health insurance, but we’ve got that covered for the time being. And we really can’t afford a plan that’s completely self-paid anyway. Once our transitional Medicaid runs out later this year, we will probably be without health insurance again unless Hubby gets it at his job.

Insurance can really eat away at the budget. If we didn’t have to have it by law or in order to keep our home and vehicles, we would probably not even fool with it (except for maybe life insurance). But I guess it’s a good thing we do have to have them. We would regret not having policies if something were to happen that we needed them.