Advertisements often amuse me. The latest is flyer someone left on our door. I have often mentioned most people assume our mortgage is like twice what it is - stuff like that. To be fair, the foreclosure rate is sky high in our neighborhood.

**You may have enough equity now to refinance! Home values are skyrocketing!

**Get rid of that expensive loan with mortgage insurance

{Do most people really have mortgage insurance these days?}

**The payment on a $400,000 loan at 5.5% is $2,271 per month, whereas the payment would be lowered to $1,796 at a rate of 3.5% -- a savings of $475 per month!!!

*choke choke* That's one hell of a mortgage! I think everyone around here with that kind of mortgage, has long ago lost their home to foreclosure. Very literally.

Well, at least didn't say anything about cash out refinance. If home values keep going up, those offers will come too...

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**We've got a washer problem. Clothes washer is leaking water (inside). We tried to narrow it down but it only leaks water when both the cold and the hot water is on. ?? We gathered it was good it did not leak when the water was turned off, but had no luck narrowing it down to one hose or the other.

I e-mailed neighbor handyman but he did not respond, so tomorrow dh will call someone I found on yelp. He was going to call Sears. I said, "Are you crazy? Let me talk to neighbor." Will still save a few bucks by not calling Sears. {I've had really good luck with yelp lately so am willing to risk it - maybe in the past we just went with the big guys - plus I haven't heard much good about Sears customer service lately - so they are far lower on my list these days than they were in the past. Last time we probably called them because was under warranty}.

Dh also told me we needed to spend about $70 to replace our phones. Landlines. I went on a tirade about our disposable society. Totally ridiculous - the batteries are dying. ANYWAY, dh is as cheap as they come, so I didn't expect him to tell me we had no choice unless we had no choice. So today he tells me he found batteries for $8. Seriously!?! I did not expect that in the least. Dh is slipping... & phew that not everything is so entirely disposable in this day and age. It's easy to believe and assume with how things are made these days. (We've got a wireless phone with 3 handsets which is very handy for the layout of our home. So we wanted to get something comparable if we replaced. Why it was $70... I don't think we have had our current set more than 5 years).