I'm out the door from work at 2:00 today. Great way to start the weekend!

I have an update on my house insurance. Remember I convinced hubby that we should start paying the property taxes and insurance directly, because the mortgage company was taking out an extra $50+/month for escrow. I decided to hold off until after 5/1, when our property taxes are due, to ensure that nothing gets screwed up. But the paperwork is ready to go!

In the meantime, I decided to compare house insurance rates. We went with State Farm at the time we bought the house (10 years ago) because we had an in-ground oil tank, and they were the only insurance co. that would cover it. My auto insurance was always with Liberty Mutual (who I love). Anyway, we switched from oil to gas about 6 years ago (and had the tank filled), but never bothered comparing rates because the money was taken out through the mortgage and it just didn't dawn on me. So now that I'm about to pay the insurance directly I gave Liberty Mutual a call. What an eye opener!!

Right now, we pay State Farm a total of $1720/year ($879 for homeowners, through the mortgage, $690 for a $1m umbrella policy, and $151 for personal articles that need to be scheduled separately).

When I called Liberty Mutual, they quoted me $741 for the homeowners and $281!!! for the umbrella (I forgot to get the personal articles quote). Even if you assume that the personal articles quote is the same (though I'm sure it'll be less), that's only a total of $1173, or a savings of $547/year!!! (32%). Every year!!!

So after I'm done kicking myself for not making this switch sooner, I'm going to run the numbers by hubby this weekend and make the switch on Monday.

This weekend should be a bit hectic, but fun. My dd starts T-Ball tomorrow, we promised the kids we would go see the Robots movie at the local theater, then on Sunday we need to visit the friends whose party we blew off last week because the kids were so sick. We'll be spending a bit of cash, as we need to go tonight to buy the baseball mitt, and the movie and pizza will add up.

Next line item on the budget is "clothes and dry cleaning". Clothes are a no-brainer for me. We don't spend a lot of money on this, we buy stuff at the end of the season, and rely on my MIL to get outfits for the kids for different occasions. Also, although it's harder now that the kids are older and they don't grow out of clothes as quickly, we take hand-me-downs when we can. The challenge for me is dry cleaning. We average about $50/month, and could probably cut it in half if we were a little more careful about how we treat our clothes. For example, hanging them up right away instead of dropping them on the floor in a wrinkled mess ! I want to shoot for $25 next month.

Have a great weekend everyone!