How I saved $30 in 20 minutes

Review your phone bill!
I looked hard at the services packaged into my local and long distance plan, and found that my lifestyle has changed enough to eliminate some features. Choices I made:
1. Ditch the voice mail. Most of the messages are to buy a vacation or satellite dish or upgrade my credit card, and our friends call us on our cell phones. Monthly savings: $7.95
2. Eliminate the fax and 2nd phone line bundle. Now that I have a "scan to email" option on my office copier, I no longer need this service. I can still fax out whenever I need to. Monthly savings: $8.95
3. Get feature blocking on my account. Four times this year I've been charged for services I didn't order, usually for an internet services. The last time I complained and got the services removed (that part usually isn't hard, just time consuming), I was told I can block 3rd party billing on my account. I expect that will save me about 2 hours time this year.
4. Change my long distance plan. I've found that we don't need unlimited long distance anymore, because 5 cents a minute is pretty cheap and we don't use it as much as we once did. Monthly savings estimate: $14.oo

They key is looking newly at your habits, patterns and routines, and then reviewing all the ways you use technology and communication. Then see if choices you made in the past still work for you.

Good luck!

Money Saving for Caregivers

I found a new resource today to get cash back on certain caregiving items. It's a website called the Caregivers Marketplace. I'm going to try it as soon as I have time to check my receipts (I'm an obsessive receipt saver anyway). I can get $1 back on each pack of the Huggies I recently bought on sale, and there are no rebate limits!

You sign up once through their website and they have arrangements made with the manufacturers to give rebates on items such as diapers, medications, home medical equipment, and other caregiving items. Some of the brand names they work with are Huggies, Gold Bond, Ensure, Nature Made, Ecotrin, Os-Cal, Depend, HoMedics, and many more. Go here for a user review and here for their website.

If you try it out, let me know what you think.

5 Things I've Learned from being on the Road

I've spent a lot of time on the road, being a home health and contract therapist. This is my short list of things I've learned from the road.

1. Never follow anyone hauling anything. You'd be amazed at the things I've witnessed falling off of trucks: ladders, chairs, a desk, a bale of hay and most astonishingly....a refrigerator!
2. Keep a camera handy. This goes back to the crazy stuff you might see, and it's tons of fun to show off these pictures. I'll put mine in a future post.
3. Stop and help someone. That is if your kids aren't in the car and you can think while under stress. I've helped a girl run from a stalking ex-boyfriend and assisted a man out of the middle of a busy 5 lane road (he'd either jumped or been thrown from a car). I've also stopped a lot only to drive on a minute later and had nothing noteworthy happen. It feels good to offer help to someone and be a part of something good in this world.
4. Use your instincts--if something looks crazy or dangerous it probably is. Once on a busy weekend night at the gas station, an able-bodied young man claiming car trouble asked me for a ride. After he declined an offer to borrow my cell phone, I was pretty certain that I was about 5 minutes away from being a statistic if I let him in my car.
5. Enjoy the solitude. Turn off the radio and cell phone and spend some quiet time with yourself and your surroundings. I enjoy kind of a zen driving, where I'm alert but relaxed, focused and present.

The healing power of the paper clip

When I was a student working in acute inpatient rehab, I had an 80ish, very country man with Parkinson's disease. He woke up one morning declaring that a miracle healing had happened. He could move better and roll over in bed, but he was most excited to show me how he had learned to button his shirts. He had taken a large paper clip and unfolded it into an elongated "S" to use as a button hook. I tried, but I couldn't improve on his invention by adding a built up handle or giving him a "real" button hook. My lesson here was that the ideas generated by my patients are far superior to anything I could suggest.

Years later, while helping a friend who was recovering from abdominal surgery, she showed me how she could get on and off the toilet pain-free. She didn't have anything to push up on and didn't want to invest in any equipment because she was expecting a rapid recovery. She sat on the toilet backwards. Backwards. I'm still amazed that I've never seen anyone do this before or since. She straddled the toilet and faced the wall. When she was ready to get up she just leaned forward and pushed up on the tank.

Just this week I saw a lady with muscular dystrophy who had half a dozen or so homemade gadgets. She used rubber "thumbs" from the office supply store to add grip and texture to the end of her implements, including the joystick on her power wheelchair. She had several yardsticks and dowel rods in her house with different tips to manage switches, reach objects and open/close cabinets. She had an opened coat hanger with a loop on the end to turn on/off lights. She turned the mouse on her computer upside down because it fit her hand better--so she had to learn that right was left and up was down. She played Bejeweled faster than I could, and she was using an upsidedown and backward mouse! The ingenuity and unstoppable spirit that she had shown was amazing!

Which brings me back to the paper clip guy. To my eyes, he wasn't moving or functioning any better. But he felt better. This man who grew his own food and built his barn, had no respect for my commercially produced button hook. But he found healing in a paper clip. Because it came from within him, it had meaning and power that I couldn't touch. The healing was in the creativity, the ingenuity, and power of generating the idea himself.