Penny Pincher at our House

I'm pretty frugal (except when it comes to buying fabric). There was a day when I spent exorbitant amounts on clothes, shoes, purses, fingernails, etc. but I no longer do that. My husband should be happy but somehow I don't think he is. I'm not complaining about him so don't get the wrong idea. I'm laughing my rear end off today. Yesterday was another story. Vince has been working on getting all our tax stuff together. I figure it's due April 15 so April 14 is a great day to start thinking about that. Not Vince! Our tax return is probably the first one the IRS receives every year. I just don't get it though because half the stuff we need doesn't arrive til mid-February it seems. So, he's meticulously entering everything in a spread sheet. Oh . . I have a spreadsheet that he and the CPA created for me last year. I do not know how on earth I can put those numbers in and then things don't add up for anyone but me but . . that's a whole nuther story! So, he has everything in the spreadsheet. He calls me and he asks me if I have any idea how much we spent last year eating out! No, I have no idea. We rarely eat out but we did spend 2 days on the road going to Louisiana, 7 days in Louisiana eating out, 2 days on the road returning home and then a trip to Georgia, 7 days there but we hardly ate out while there, and another day on the road returning home. We do occasionally go out but probably not more than once a month. I figured if we'd spent less than $4,000 eating out, that was good. Well, it was WAY less than $4,000 . . about 1/4th of that amount. I just didn't get it . . still don't. He said he just wanted to make sure I knew. That conversation didn't really end well but I got over it. That's not the best story. While continuing to meticulously crunch the numbers, he noticed that Synergy (our local phone service) had gone up on their rates so he called and switched back to Bell South. But, what he didn't realize was that this was going to screw up the DSL through Earthlink. He got home from work today and had no internet. He began calling Earthlink and found out that during the switch, we were not given a DSL line, blah, blah and because the change "cancelled" our contract, his credit card had already been charged $150 for cancelling before the contract was over. And, if he wanted to reinstate Earthlink DSL, there would be an additional $90 charge and in 15 short days, he would have internet again. OMG! I would not have wanted to be on the other end of that conversation. After about 4 hours on the phone with several people, he got the $150 credited back to the credit card, got the $90 fee waived and will have internet again in 4 or 5 days. Now . . do you want to know how much money he saved by switching from Synergy to Bell South? Do you really want to know?? He is saving $1/month! I don't think I understand his thinking sometime most of the time. Judy