1st Anniversary

This last Sunday (March 21st) was our first year anniversary! The year seemed to go by pretty fast but a lot happened during it. We were together for 9 of the 12 months because Ryan was still in Chicago when we first got married to finish his training and I was in Washington. We weren't able to really go out and celebrate because we are poor poor poor. :( On Saturday we did go to Coldstone though because I had a coupon:) I had cake batter ice cream with gummy bears and Ryan had french vanilla ice cream with snickers. It was delicious and of course Ryan was jealous of mine.

Last Saturday we cleaned out the spare bedroom for Ryan's sister Cherie and her little girl Marcie. Ryan flew to Oklahoma Monday and helped Cherie finish packing and cleaning. They left this morning and are driving straight through. They will be here in the morning and I can't wait to see them!

Coupons

I started cutting coupons last month and this last weekend was a record…I saved $24 on groceries with coupons! It’s not near as amazing as that lady who can end up buying her groceries for a penny but it’s still awesome! I cut coupons from the huge newspaper we get on the weekend and from a few websites. Some of the websites I’ve used are: shopathome.com; coupons.com; and smartsource.com. Ryan had to buy Sunny D for a work fundraiser so I looked online and was able to get coupons from the sunny d site. I was afraid to use coupons at first because I didn’t want to be the annoying person at the store taking forever at the register with all the coupons but it really doesn’t take that long. All they do is swipe your coupon like they do the other items. So I don’t care if the people do get annoyed with me because I’m saving money! I use a little picture album book to keep my coupons organized.

Tax Refund

So we waited and waited for all of our tax statements to get to us. Once we finally got all of our statements we filed our taxes right away so we could get our refund sooner than later. We filed on February 22nd and the IRS said they deposited our refund in our bank on March 5th. So we waited and waited for our money to show up and it never did. We called the bank and the IRS to see if they could help us. At first the bank said they couldn't do anything and we just had to wait but our second call to the bank was more helpful...they actually looked it up and said they hadn't actually recieved it from the IRS. When we called the IRS we waited for like 20 minutes before someone could actually talk to us. All of our information was right when we talked with the IRS...they had the right routing number and account number and everything. So they told us that they would have to send us a paper to sign saying we didn't recieve our refund which would take 7-10 days and then once they recieved it back they would check to make sure we still haven't gotten our money and if we haven't they would send it straight to us which would take 6 or more weeks! So much for filing as soon as possible. But Ryan figured out last Saturday that we gave them the wrong account number....we gave them our whole card number instead of the 8 middle numbers that are our actual account number. LAME! So we still might get our refund before the IRS paper goes through but we still need to call the IRS again and see if they can fix it so we can get it sooner than the 6 or more weeks. We just want our money!