Day 261: Car Stereo, Nalgene Bottle, & Skirt Hangers (plus incoming $)

Total Spent Today: $298.31
Net Spent Today: $243.33

REI — ($50.13)
As I men­tioned in yesterday’s post, I col­lected all of our old Nal­gene bot­tles (well, all the ones the kids could find — one of The Daughter’s is still miss­ing) to return for a refund/store credit.  The return process took a cou­ple of min­utes but over­all went very smoothly.  Iron­i­cally, the com­puter showed a record of my 2001 pur­chase of two older, smaller bot­tles I returned but had no record at all of the large bot­tles I pur­chased last Octo­ber.  The clerk still issued store credit on the larger bot­tles — partly, I think, due to the fact that all of the bot­tles had the name REI stamped on them as bold as you please (they must have been a special-issue Nal­gene man­u­fac­tur­ered specif­i­cally for REI stores).The only down­side to this whole trans­ac­tion is that, for what­ever rea­son, the clerk wouldn’t put my store credit on a REI gift card.  My credit comes in the form of a paper receipt that I can use in any REI store or on-line but I must have the receipt.  If I lose it, I’m S.O.L.

REI — $10.26
Spent in the form of store credit (my paper receipt now states I have a credit of $39.87).  I bought myself a red wide-mouth Nal­gene bottle.

Auto Stereo Store — $277.57
I’ve been shop­ping for car stereos for the past month or so and just last week finally decided on the model I wanted.  So today we did a lit­tle car jug­gling so I could have The Husband’s Impreza.  The stereo is The Husband’s Father’s Day gift.  But it’s not for him at all.  It’s for The Daugh­ter.  Here’s what happened:The Impreza came with a very bare-bones stereo.  Two FM bands, one AM band, and a sin­gle disc CD player.  Nice and func­tional but noth­ing spe­cial.  What it’s really miss­ing is an iPod/aux input capability.I’m a real­ist.  I know how impor­tant music is to 16yo girls and I know what a dis­trac­tion music and CD’s and radios and iPods can be for a new dri­ver (well, any dri­ver but espe­cially new dri­vers).  So I pre­sented my argu­ment to The Hus­band sev­eral weeks ago — we should install an iPod inter­face stereo in the name of safety.  The cri­te­ria was very specific:  the 16yo had to be able to con­trol the iPod through the stereo itself leav­ing her hands and atten­tion free for dri­ving and the but­tons and lay­out had to be sim­ple enough for a 73-yo radio-listening dad.Finding a stereo that met both cri­te­ria was harder than I’d expected it to be.  I ended up going with an Alpine CDA-9884.  Happy early Father’s Day, sweetie 

Tar­get — $10.48
I found a Michael Graves tie/belt hanger  ($3.99) that I like bet­ter than the one I bought the other day.  I also bought two 3-packs of skirt hang­ers ($2.99/ea.) for The Daughter’s closet.  Each hanger has a metal cen­ter hook so you can actu­ally hang another hanger from the first hanger instead of hav­ing each indi­vid­ual hanger hang from the closet rod.  Helps save closet space which is at a pre­mium in The Daughter’s closet (yeah, she has more clothes that she prob­a­bly needs but mostly it’s just a tiny closet).

Once Upon a Child — ($5.85)
I took my bag of rejects from yesterday’s Plato’s Closet run to see what OUAC would do with the con­tents.  I had slightly more sucess (in # of items accepted) but their value was lower.  They rejected sev­eral things because they were too large (those in-between sizes of 16 and 18 don’t have much resale value, appar­ently) but they did accept 4 pair of Old Navy shorts.  Any­way, it’s another $5.85 I didn’t have this morning.

Since all of the items sold were The Son’s, I’ve added $5.85 back into his cloth­ing bud­get cat­e­gory in my YNAB pro­gram*.

Related posts:

1. Day 260: Bagels and BPA-Free Nal­gene Bottles
2. $$: Another Sat­ur­day in Sub­ur­bia edition
3. Day 185: BIG Expenses Today
4. Day 84: Printer Ink and More Cement
5. Day 259: Cul­tural Expe­ri­ences & Plas­tic Bins