I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…

Archive for the ‘vent’ Category

Today is Free Iced Coffee Day at Dunkin Donuts.  If you will be near or pass by a Dunkin Donuts today, by all means, stop in and get a free iced coffee!  The offer is good until 10pm tonight, so make sure to take advantage of it if it will incur no hidden costs for you.

And what do I mean by hidden costs?  Well, I searched on the Dunkin Donuts website to see if there is a location near me.  On the East Coast where I grew up it seemed there was a DD on every corner, but in my experience, they are much less prevalent in the Midwest.   I theorize it has something to do with Krispy Kreme.  But, anyway.  I was really excited to actually have a search result come up, and see that there was one located in my city.  Hurrah!

On the other side of my city.  17 miles away.  One way.  Most of it highway driving but still, my car only gets about 30 miles to the gallon.  So a 34 mile round trip drive to get a “free” iced coffee would cost me at least a gallon of gas, which at current prices here is just shy of $4.  It would be less expensive for me to just go to the Starbucks less than a mile from me and pay for an iced coffee there I bet.  And besides, I have a $5 Starbucks gift card.

This of course is not at all the fault of Dunkin Donuts, and I hope many people can easily take advantage of their free promotion.  But not me.  I’ll be making some iced coffee at home from my spouse’s leftovers I put in the refrigerator when I got up this morning.  And pretending it was from Dunkin Donuts. 

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Saturn called, and they absolve themselves of responsibility for my car’s engine death.

1.  They aren’t sure why the rod broke, so they can’t tell if it is their fault.  (HUH?)
2.   We are the second owners of the car, not the first.  So basically, we suck in their eyes. 
3.   We didn’t have the oil changes/maintenance done at Saturn.  I *told* the woman EXACTLY where our service records are (we have it serviced at the same two places) and that they would be happy to help her.  No dice.

I was very civil, calm, yet extremely harsh on the phone about this outcome, and she said she would “document my dissatisfaction”.   I even made her speechless for a full 35 seconds (I counted the silence, lol).

I’ll be writing them a followup email tomorrow to completely document my concerns, as well as letting them in on my blog address, just in case they’d like to see one voice in action.  They probably won’t care.  But it’ll make me feel better.  Hey, Saturn, note my RSS numbers and click on my sitemeter.  This isn’t just one person talking to an empty room.

At least I tried.

Oh, and the car is now fixed.  Heh.

I will never buy another Saturn.

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As readers of the comments to my last post have learned, the car is not in good shape. I’m not exactly sure what happened to it to get it to this point, but to quote from my spouse’s email to me about what the Saturn dealer said:

Ugh, it’s the engine, I mean the whole engine. Something broke inside of it and pushed some crankshaft out so basically we need to rebuild it or buy a “new” engine.

My spouse did call me to tell me the news, but he also emailed what he remembered as far as details. So, the engine - dead. Cost of replacing it? Around $3700. I said $3500 before but that was my brain doing some self-preserving rounding trick on the numbers, I guess. Plus there are any random incidentals like the tow to the shop so the total will be above $3700 if we go this route, but I am going to just use that number right now for simplicity’s sake.

So again, back to the “options”. We could buy a new (to us) car instead of fixing this one. It is something I am sorely tempted to do, but as far as our overall budget and debt load, an option I don’t think I am comfortable with. We still owe ~$3300 on this car, and we’d have to roll that into our next car’s payment. We don’t currently have the money to pay off this car and buy a new car and pay it all in cash. At all. I have to think on this option more. I’m not sure how comfortable I am buying a car that is more than a few years old and having a payment on it still. This car is 7 years old, so I don’t know why my brain thinks like this, but all I can wrap my head around is buying a 3 year old car for $10-12,000, not buying a different ~7 year old car for a lot less. How much less? I have no idea. At this point I’m babbling so I’ll move on to other options. I haven’t discarded this idea but I’m not leaning towards it either right now. Ask me again in three hours and I might feel differently. I do think a $3700 car repair might qualify as “driving the car into the ground”, though.

We’ve done some research on possible other places to take it to get it fixed (we’d have to tow it there of course) and my spouse is currently calling around to see what our options are on that front. I honestly have no idea how that will pan out. I’ll know better later this afternoon.

So, that leaves us looking at - what if the $3700 number is what we are left dealing with? The Saturn dealer offers financing. Yes, the evil of financing. I would generally reject that out of hand, but they do offer 90 days same as cash so if we took advantage of that, it would give me a little time to gather up as much money as I possibly could. My thoughts on that is to pay $1000 immediately and put the other $2700 on the 90 days same as cash plan. Then when my transfers out of the ING subaccounts go through as well as my spouse gets paid again (within the next week and a bit), I pay another $1000. Then I will have about 80 days to come up with the other $1700. I would snowflake anything I get my hands on for the next two months directly to that $1700 and if it doesn’t completely get paid off, I can decide then if I want to pull the remainder from college savings accounts or if I want to balance transfer the remainder to one of my two empty credit cards.

Hello setback.

And that begs the question - what if another emergency happens in the next 90 days? Honestly that’s something that I can’t completely wrap my head around but obviously is a very real possibility. Paying everything possible to this debt before rebuilding the emergency fund leaves us open to another disaster as well. At this point, I genuinely can say I am just trying the best I can to not let this become the beginning to a huge downward spiral. And everything else aside, I am trying the best I can to figure out how to minimize the damage to our finances and maximize our options so that we turn this around as fast as possible. That may necessitate revising the above to rebuilding the $1000 emergency fund before paying off the remaining $1700, if we go that route. I don’t know yet. Still… thinking.

The destruction of my spouse’s student loan will have to wait. The $175.17 left on the 0% credit card will have to wait. We’ll get through this, whatever we decide to do. And whatever that is, for the first time since I started the blog, that debt number is going to up this month instead of down. Sigh. And I will definitely keep you posted. Your thoughts and comments are welcome, my brain, still in shock.

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I mentioned earlier that there were some problems with my car’s taillights. My spouse took the car in yesterday morning to have the service station re-fix it since the fix the first time wasn’t adequate, and learned that the right taillight was unfixable because the part had been recalled by Saturn. Why they didn’t figure that out Monday, I don’t know, and we won’t be taking the car back to that place. I wish I knew how to find a good mechanic.

But, anyway. We made an appointment with the Saturn dealer to get the recall work done this morning. I was excited that the problem would be fixed for free since it is a recall. The top brake light and one of the taillights still worked, so my spouse felt comfortable driving the car home. But the car did not cooperate. As he was exiting the highway on his way home from work (about 2 miles from our house), the check engine light started flashing, the car made some weird noises, and then died at the end of the exit ramp. He coasted it to the side of the road, and called me.

The timing of this event was pretty fortuitous, all told. It could have happened on the way home on our 800 mile trip, or even on the way out on our trip. But still, it wasn’t the greatest timing, for it was 11 degrees out at the time and even though my spouse was close to home, he wasn’t close enough. I ended up calling him a cab to get home and a tow truck to the Saturn dealer for the car. More of that story is on my family blog, we’ll just call the cab fare (which was only $8 including tip) my spouse’s stupid tax for the day, since he had the keys to the shed (where the extra carseats for his car are stored) in his pocket so I couldn’t go get him with his car. But anyway.

So now, I wait. Obviously, the car has problems beyond the back taillights. The question is, how serious are the problems? I don’t know yet. Our emergency fund stood at $1263.80, the amount over $1000 was a small amount of interest plus the remainder of the November extra paycheck. That $263.80 has now been transferred into our checking account. We also have about $300 left in our checking account which is the carryover from December (more on that when I do the December wrapup post in the next few days). So basically I have about $550 immediately available, plus $1000 on standby and transferable at a moment’s notice. I am hoping that’ll be enough. Again, I have no idea how bad this is.

And we were so close to having the credit card paid off. In fact, that ~$263 was going to be transferred to our checking account today and as soon as my car was fixed (the recall work, I mean), I was going to pay off the credit card with it. Now of course, we’ll be waiting on that to see what happens. So close yet now so far.

I am very thankful for the emergency fund. Hopefully it is enough. If not, we’ll be discussing our backup plans. I’m not sure what those are but we do have options, depending on what we decide is the lesser of all evils and how bad the damage really is. And we’ll be reassessing our whole emergency fund strategy. We were planning on doing that anyway as soon as the credit card debt was paid off. Now, we’ll be doing it just a little bit earlier.

Hello Murphy. Not so nice to meet you, but it could be under a lot worse circumstances, all told.

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And maybe I am now. Emphasis on the maybe.

This originally was titled “Will the nightmare that is Wachovia never end?” but I’m feeling slightly more charitable now actually sitting down to write it. Maybe all the #1 in customer satisfaction commercials have penetrated my brain. Ah, the power of advertising.

A few days ago I opened my mailbox to an envelope from Wachovia that looked suspiciously like an Annual Fee Invoice for my IRA. An IRA I closed a month ago and moved to Vanguard. When I opened it, indeed, Wachovia wanted $75 for the priviledge of servicing my account for another year. But my account is closed. So… well….

I called Wachovia and after a ten or so minute wait got a nice person on the phone who said I was correct, my account is closed, they have no idea why I was invoiced and to ignore the letter. Good deal.

I got his name just in case. Wachovia and I have a history.

I didn’t originally open my IRA account with Wachovia. I started with a small local company, and then that company was bought by Prudential, so I was part of that for a while. Then I think part of Prudential merged with Wachovia. Or something. It was never quite clear except that I was now a customer of Wachovia and my account now had an annual fee.

Well, okay. I wasn’t so pleased about the fee but that is not why Wachovia is on my list.

In 2003 I moved from one apartment to another. I dutifully notified companies I did business with of my new address. I don’t *particularly* remember talking to Wachovia. I thought I did, but I will not guarantee I did. But my statements started coming addressed to my new place of residence (not a post office forwarding sticker, my new address was on the statement itself), so it seems like I might have. About a year after my move, I got a statement that said my account now had a value of $0. $0? What?

So, I panicked, I hyperventilated, and I called them up. After talking to about 15 people, someone told me that my account had been moved to “unclaimed and abandoned money” because they had a letter returned to them from the post office. A letter that a year after my move they had apparently sent to my old address. Even though they had been sending my statements, including this $0 balance one, to my new address. Huh.

The man I talked to said I needed to send them a letter saying this was my address, I had not abandoned my account, and it would be recovered. He promised that was all that needed to be done.

Not.

I did so, sent first class with delivery confirmation, and got ANOTHER statement of my $0 balance the next month. So I called again. And this person claimed to have NO RECORD of my previous call, said that my letter was discarded because it was not notarized so there was no proof I wrote it, and that I would have to deal with the state they abandoned my money in. Oh… no. Nuh uh. I cried and screeched and cried and demanded supervisor after supervisor and called back and talked to more people and three days later I finally got someone to say that if I sent them another notarized letter it could be rectified. With a very large emphasis on the fact that somehow, *I* did something wrong here.

All I did was trust Wachovia to take care of my IRA money.

Anyway. So at that moment, I decided I was escaping Wachovia as soon as I could figure out how. It may have taken 3 more years, but I did it finally. I think.

Because they may still be looking for “their” $75.

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