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Originally Posted by LOL!
We do not have cable, but use Netflix and an antenna in the attic to get local HDTV.
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This is what I wanted to do. The other people in the house won that one. Having said that, I think we will cut down on the cable service.
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We had trees and limbs removed before Ike.
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I have never loved trees. So hadn't really had a house before with a lot of trees. I was looking in the front yard the other day and just started counting trees. I stopped at 60. They are mostly very large pecan trees. To remove them and branches would cost a fortune. If you add in the back we are probably over 100 of them. When we bought this house, DH thought the trees were lovely. And, they are.
So, I don't know that I could effectively paid to avoid the problems we had during the hurricane. After the hurricane when it was cleaned up I had the service go around and look at all the trees for any branches close to breaking, etc. But I still had a $1450 bill this year when a big storm came through. Had a service out, same deal. Right now I have two huge branches in my front and in my back (the one in the back would have severely damaged the guest house if it had landed a few feet the other way). Since they are on the ground we can cut them up ourselves with the chain saw. Next house....no trees. Well, not like this.
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I'm sensing that you pay more because of you don't negotiate prices for services as well as others. This goes for tires, tree-trimming, insurance, maids, etc. For example, why would maid service cost $400 a month unless they came twice a week?
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We do negotiate prices. The tires were from NTW. The tree trimming we got quotes from 3 services for the recent work. Not for Ike. After Ike you couldn't get a quote from most places. We finally got the work done by a landscaping company that had done work for us before so were willing to. Had we not been an existing company they wouldn't have. We couldn't defer it at that time as we had brances on the power lines.
Maid service. We used a service, checked several in our area. At one point we discussed reducing from once a week to every other week. That reduced the cost by 1/4 only. We also had a couple of rooms that aren't used that much so excluded them from the work. An individual maid might well have been cheaper but did not really have a source for one. We haven't lived in this area long (about 3 years). I agree that would have been better if we could find one. Any ideas how to go about finding one if you don't know anyone who can recommend one?
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I'm seeing your insurance costs as outrageous (what if you made son get his own insurance and not be on your policies?).
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You can't do that since he is our dependent. I did check. He does pay, however, his share of the insurance which is about $2600 a year. So really DH and I are paying only a portion of the auto insurance cost. When our son had his accident, he also paid the $1000 deductible for our car to be repaired. I price insurance every year. The homeowners was $7000 our first year (!) but is $2200 now (the high expense was because we are more than 5 miles from a fire station...thankfully one has now been built that is a little closer)
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I think a 2500 sq ft home should not have a $1500 mortgage.
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We will be likely buying on a couple of acres and figure a mortgage of about $250,000 although we may be able to do it for less.
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Such a house should probably average only $120 a month in electricity costs.
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That would be good 
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