So, this is how I make it through the weeks, months, years lol, just one day at a time. I mean I want to look ahead, but it depresses me. Will we be able to do a vacation? Will we have tire money for the biggest race of the year? How much will we owe for fuel oil this winter, dear lord I can’t even think about that. So, I try to focus on today, what can I do today that will save us money? What can I do today that my kids will enjoy? Most days, it isn’t much, it might be printing out coupons or loading them onto our grocery card or just watching a cartoon with my RaceRugrats. Sometimes it’s even less like Googling until I can’t Google any more looking for a deal or the best place to buy something IF we save enough for it. Then are days when I can’t even sit and watch a cartoon because the RaceRugrats are intent on fighting and screaming and whining and driving us crazy and it’s all you can do not jam a pen in your eye just so you can have a few hours alone at the ER. Let me tell you about this blog, I don’t know if anyone will actually read it. I don’t know if anyone will actually relate to it (I mean I can guess but I won’t speak for the population). I just know that I have a stream of consciousness that cannot be stopped and this is where I will let it out. Sometimes I find myself texting or emailing myself random things running through my brain just to get them out.

Here is the deal with me, I fail ALL the time. No one likes to fail but ya know what, we do, a lot. There are times I forget to pay a bill or put the wrong shoes in the bag for Racette’s school the next morning. There are times my money-saving doesn’t happen, things we can’t afford, things we can’t just up and do and while it feels unbelievably crappy when all that happens, we live. MyRacer and I have developed a mantra of sorts over the years, every time things go south, and that happens a lot for us no matter how hard we try, we say “We’ll figure it out”. That doesn’t mean we actually do, some things you just can’t get around, but we make the effort and if nothing can be done we technically did “figure out” that there is nothing we can do, it is what it is. Those times really suck, but sometimes we do figure it out and then we’re all “yay, high-five”… not really but I think I may institute a mandatory “yay, high-five” after typing that just now.

Let’s look at how I failed this week. MyRacer is going south to race for the weekend and needed a hotel room. Both Expedia and Hotels.com had coupons available for not a crazy amount of savings, like 5-10%, but at least it was something! They also both touted a coupon for booking through their mobile app. Now, don’t get me wrong, I LOVE both of these sites, they are my go-to when traveling and the prices are usually the same. My deciding factor is if one has a coupon I can use and which will give me more back with eBates and if I still can’t decide, I flip the almighty coin. I freaking LOVE eBates. I am an eBates junkie and I can’t believe it took me so long to find and use it. Granted, I have been an eBates member for years now but I know it existed before I joined and that bugs me, like I should have been the first subscriber. If you do online shopping and you haven’t registered on eBates, you are missing out! EBates is a way to earn cash back on things you are already buying. All you need to register is an email address and boom! you’re on your way. The eBates website let’s you search for the online store you’re shopping from and all you have to do is click the link to your store and do your shopping. There is even an eBates button extension available for your internet browser that will automatically alert you if you’re browsing a store and cash back is offered, so you’ll never forget! It’s totally awesome, FREE, super easy, AND the website will even show you coupons available and current sales, you can’t go wrong! Every quarter, eBates automatically pays you your cash back balance. You can hook eBates to your PayPal account to have your cash back payment sent electronically, or you can have a paper check sent to your home by mail. I have gotten hundreds of dollars back using eBates and I highly recommend you give it a try!

Now back to my hotel search woes! MyRacer’s hotel choices were minimal for where he was going to race in Virginia and North Carolina. Find somewhere not too far away from each track and near some sort of food. Both tracks are off in the wild, not in the center of some humming metropolis so we had 2 potential options. Do you know that none of the coupons could be applied to either of them? Not the coupon codes, not the mobile app one, nothing, nada, zilch-o. This infuriated me. I mean it’s not like I was booking the Waldorf Astoria and we would save bank, this was a regular cheap hotel chain that when I did the math, would have saved me $20. Not a crazy amount that makes my room even close to free but enough to make me happy. That was $20 more for gas in the truck, $20 towards food, $20 that could have went for pit gate fees, but nope. Do not pass go, do not collect your $20 folks. So do you know what I did next? I randomly started choosing all these destinations and hotel chains attempting to apply the freaking coupons SOMEWHERE, just for my peace of mind to prove to myself the coupons were real… Never happened. I could not find a single place they would apply to, and it ruined my day. So, not only had I failed to score a slight savings for MyRacer, I was mad at the hotel-booking internet gods for giving me false hope. I DID however, have my good friend eBates to rely on, no matter how small the percent back, when I saw the $0.37 pending in my eBates transactions, I was pumped. Hallelujah, something out there freaking works!