I am a little anal retentive when it comes to getting a good deal. I hate throwing away our hard earned cash, and sometimes it feels like finding ways to save money, cut costs, etc. is my third job. I will spend hours on the phone/computer researching the best cell phone plan for our family, or the best rate on car insurance. And sometimes it pays off.

A little over a year ago, we were in dire financial straights and I had started listening to Dave Ramsey. Two of the things that he suggested to the women who took care of their children full time were to take in work at home projects (check, I was already doing that), and to become an expert home economist.

Somehow hearing him say that to other women lit a fire under me. I started thinking up tons of ways for us to save money.  I thought up a bunch that didn’t work, but here are a couple that did. I knew my husband had received some loan forgiveness for working in a rural area of Missouri for 5 years, but I wondered if there were any other programs since his entire teaching career had been in low income schools. I searched for hours on government websites and finally found a program that my husband qualified for (and I bet if you’re a teacher, social worker, or other public servant, that there is something out there for you too). I printed the document and we waded through all the bureaucratic school district offices until we got all of the signatures that we needed. It might have taken 5 hours of actual work, and 3-4 months of waiting in between to do all the necessary steps.  At the end we received $5000 of forgiveness which cut his student loan almost in half. I’m so glad I went through the due diligence to do it.

That victory got me all revved up. Next, (and sorry I’m sharing this with the internet honey) I decided to tackle the magazine subscription monster. For the entire length of the time that I had known my husband, he received and ungodly number of magazine subscriptions to the most random publications. He got one from Car and Driver, one from Men’s Health, and one from Sports Illustrated to name a few. The weird thing is, my husband is pretty much a geek. The one magazine that he actually reads is Mental Floss which is a trivia magazine. He doesn’t like cars, or have any interest in reading about fitness, or sports. He just doesn’t.

I finally was able to pry out of him that he had put one of those monster multiple subscriptions on his credit card a few years ago, and the magazines just kept coming. We were probably recycling 20 magazines every month and not reading ANY of them. So I decided that I would track down the company and ask them to cancel our subscriptions and refund the issues that we had not yet received. It was a day of many phone calls and little detective clues. I had to call multiple companies to even find the name of the company that had our subscriptions.

Once I got through to The Company, I realized that they had a screwy phone system that didn’t allow you to talk to a real person, so I persistently left a message every 15 minutes for a few hours.  Later that day I got a call back and a promise for a refund. You guys aren’t going to believe this, but when I got the check in the mail it was for more than $400 and it paid for most of our Christmas that year.

I am on a new crusade these days. We’re in the throws of negotiation for a house that we want to buy, and the process is taking longer than I thought. I was getting frustrated, but I realized last week that it’s a good thing because now I have time to do the research that I wanted to do in order to get a good deal on our mortgage. I had just been going through a mortgage broker trusting that she could get me the best deal out there. Well…on Friday I found a program in our state that will give us .75% less in interest than her lowest quote, plus about $1,000 less in closing costs. We are going to save a bundle.

I hear people say all the time that they don’t have the time to fully research out what they are doing, and I say I couldn’t afford to live the other way.

Any of you have stories of persistence paying off?