Crazy how I put complaints or wishes on this website and then they happen for me! Like, immediately!

Yesterday morning I was complaining about our settlement check for Workman's Comp was taking forever to arrive with no distribution date in sight. After my complaint I emailed the lawyer requesting an update and she said that she will deposit the money in our bank account that day!I just logged in and it's there!

About a week ago I put it out there in my blog that I was tired of chasing down the guy who owes me money and how he is so unreliable. That day I talked to him and he said he would get me a payment over the upcoming weekend. And he did!

This website has magical money qualities!

I wonder how the California disaster would have gone (or not gone) if I had been a regular blogger of this website at the time.

Anyways, for the settlement money that has arrived. I am writing big ginormous checks today to pay off our credit cards!

We also have our roofer coming in today to replace our roof for $10,500. He's taking the 14- 17 yr old shingles off and replacing it with metal. He said our roof is so flat that shingles were a terrible idea for it. Water is pooling up there and shortening the shingle lifespan. New shingles were $2500 cheaper than metal, but we opted for metal because it is expected to get a full lifetime out of the metal, rather than a shorter lifetime of shingles.

While we were in CA the roof leaked and rotted a lot of wood and spread black mold in the nursery ceiling. We had two different people checking on our place semi regularly (someone was out here 1-2x a month) and no one noticed it. And we asked them to check when it rained because the roof was old! But they were checking the attic only for water damage, not the bedroom ceilings below the attic.

We were told when we bought the place over 3 yrs ago that the roof needed to be replaced "any day", and we often DISCUSSED saving up for it. But there always seemed to be a project that was a more short term priority. The timing of the roof actually going hit us pretty bad as we were coming off a huge financial investment with a lot of incoming transitional bills. It was a good reminder moment for me to SAVE UP FOR BIG EXPENSES!

And husband has our A/C guy coming out today to discuss adding A/C to our attic. We are slowly turning it into a Mancave/Playroom. It's huge, with a walk up staircase, and it WAS finished when we bought the place. But very old/dirty so we tore out the carpeting and damaged a lot of sheet rock with our remodel (we had to lift exterior walls and that caused cracks in sheet rock throughout) and thus used the room for storage. For years we have talked about what we wanted to do with the room.

This month we cleared out most of the attic and have decided to do a bare bones upgrade. We asked our handyman to update the electrical and plumbing up there and we were pleasantly surprised all was working. I remember when we were remodeling that our permit inspector refused to pass our inspections because of that attic, not understanding it was going to be turned into storage space. But I thought our contractor finally got the inspector to "let it go". I guess the inspector got our contractor to upgrade all the systems!

The floor is plywood and it will stay that way for now. Husband wants to add an A/C vent and then put his TV, seating, video games up there for now. When the baby is crawling we will add carpet, new sheet rock, paint and redo the bathroom up there. Then she can have a play space and keep her toys up there.

That's it for spending the money. We'll have enough left over as a down payment on a future rental property purchase. My goal is to SAVE THE MONEY and chase down our California money to add to the account. Maybe by Christmas we will have collected all of CA money and will have enough for a down payment and repairs on a rental. And husband can have a project to work on. Or maybe the baby will be enough of a project. We'll see.