When we bought our house, our buyer’s agent gave us a number of house warming gifts from his company. One of them was a 75 gallon coupon to the local oil company, provided that you signed on with their automatic delivery program for a minimum of one year. When it came time to prepay for our oil, I discovered that I had misplaced the coupon. A few months go by, and I have no luck finding the coupon and we are beginning to get low on what oil is left. I bit the bullet and called to purchase a few thousand dollars of oil without the benefit of getting 75 gallons of it for free. It turned out however that the window of opportunity for purchasing your oil in advance had passed and we could only get onto a pay as you go plan.

It turns out that losing that coupon saved us a lot of money, because the price of oil was much lower all winter than if we had prepaid. Not only that, but they assured us that if we found the coupon at a later date we could still use it as long as we were using the automatic delivery program. Fast forward to a month ago, and I found the coupon.

I went to oil company in person to redeem the coupon for 75 of the 125 gallons that had been delivered, and then paid the cash price difference for what was left. Our oil company charges a different price for the oil if you pay them on time. I was then a little surprised when a bill arrived for the difference between the cash price we paid plus the free 75 gallons and the full price for the oil. I called them up, we sorted it on the phone, and they took the charge off of our bill as we had not only paid on time, but when I received the bill it was still within 30 days of delivery.

I thought that that would be the end of it, until we got another statement last week. Our balance due was $0, but it showed that we actually had a credit for about the amount that they had over charged us. When I looked over the transaction history, I saw that they had credited us for that one penny less, and then corrected their error by crediting us for the full amount that they were supposed to. They never removed the original charge, though, so it turned into a discount that was about twice as large as it was supposed to be.

Of course, I called them back to inform them of the error. While getting an extra 10 gallons of so of oil for free on our next delivery would have been nice, we didn’t actually deserve it. Had they given me any problems when I tried letting them know about the “problem” then I would not have wasted any more time and would have just accepted the gift. However, they were very thankful that I called them and have supposedly zeroed out our balance so that everything is as it should be.

I just hope that they didn’t make another mistake and that they don’t now show us as owing them money again; not until they make another delivery at least.

At the end of August, I told my Geico that I had gotten married and my insurance premium dropped by over $100. I had planned on combining our policies shortly thereafter.

Well, over 3 months is shortly thereafter, I suppose. We never wound up combining them and then getting a refund on the unused policy. Instead, we just combined the policies once the original one that we were cancelling came due. All in all, we will be saving about $360 or so per year. Next year I plan on shopping around to see if I can get a better rate, and bring that number down even more.

I finally got around to calling our mortgage lender today at lunch time, and it turns out that they already had my tax bill and have it scheduled to be paid in a couple of days.

I did not actually have to do anything, which is a huge plus. I am still going to call next week to make sure that the town has my payment, though.

I originally called my mortgage broker to ask him what I needed to do, and he suggested I just call to make sure I don’t need to fax something over. Once everything is set and going it seems to work out fine, and there is no need to inform them every time you have a bill coming due. It’s still better to make sure and be safe than sorry, though, especially for your first payment.

At the grocery store, you can save quite a bit of money on your deli meats in two ways. The best way is to just buy a full ham or turkey, cook it yourself, and then slice it. You get the most bang for your buck, but then you have a lot of food that will need to be eaten fairly quickly.

The better way is to get meat and cheese ends. Around here, deli meats usually cost around $8 per pound or so, but the meat and cheese ends cost only $2.99 per pound. Well, they did until today. Now they cost $3.49 per pound.
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Our property tax bill has arrived, and not surprisingly we do not have the cash in our checking account to pay it. Not that that is anything to worry about; it is what the escrow account that is bundled into our mortgage is for. Every month, our mortgage is divvied up into principal, interest, and escrow payments; the escrow payments are for insurance premiums and property taxes.

I am not sure if I need to do anything to get that money out of escrow, however, or whether the bank where our mortgage is held takes care of it. I have been meaning to call them and ask all week, but I have not had an opportunity to do it yet. I am going to try to remember to call tomorrow to find out what I need to do in order to get our tax bill paid. We still have nearly a month, so I am not too worried about it yet.

I recently got married, and this week I have been exploring new insurance options that have opened up. The first thing that I discovered was that merely telling my insurance agent that I was married entitled me to (nearly) a $100 reduction in my insurance premium, which I will receive in the form of a refund within the next week. Tomorrow, we will be calling up my wife’s insurance agent to get a reduction in her rates as well.

We want to consolidate our auto insurance onto one policy in order to save even more money. I have not run the exact numbers, but on top of the $400 we should save each year just for telling our current auto insurance policy holders that we are married we should be able to save at least a few hundred dollars more per year by being on the same policy. If we add it to our homeowners policy, we can also get a good 20% off of that, as well. The only real problem I see with doing that is that the homeowners discount won’t really make up the difference between my current insurance policy and the one that our homeowners can offer for automobile.

I’ll share more details once we have all of our quotes and decide who we are going to go with. That should probably happen this weekend some time. As for how my $100 refund means saving $400 per year, that $100 is on a 6 month policy. So, I will be saving about $194 and change over the course of a year. I do not know how much of a discount my wife would get, but if it is around the same amount then that gets us up near the $400 per year without even changing our policies.