Eagles (and geese) may soar, but weasels don’t get sucked into jet engines.

I think there’s a lesson here. Last year I was walking along Slade Street and ran into a high school friend.  Oh was she riding high, in her Lexus (she is/was a trophy wife), leather boots, fur coat, Chanel sunglasses.  I buy my clothes at TJ Maxx and Target (no animal dies for my clothes!), and drive a Volkswagon Golf. We had a coffee at Starbucks, and the conversation was pleasant, although she managed to mention three foreign countries they’ve traveled to in the past couple years.

Fast forward to 2009.  I hear her husband dumped her, his real estate company is completely bankrupt, they lost their house. I’m not saying I wish such things on anybody (noooo not meeeeee).  But it more or less makes me feel happy we’re weathering this downturn without a major disruption.

Last month the refrigerator went on the blink, and my own husband was out of work. We just didn’t have spare cash for a new one.  My husband said, in joke, maybe we should store our food in the cars. So I looked at my Golf and said, “hey, we can get a car title loan.”  Sure enough, I went online and found Palatine Title Loans, where car title loans are available in about a day.  Which was perfect, because we were able to order a new refrigerator for delivery before the food went bad (we actually did keep the frozen foods out there for one night, since it was about 10 degrees out).

This weasel survives, thank you very much.

Palatine is also near, Inverness, Lake Zurich, Deer Park, Barrington, and Buffalo Grove.

Because I am a man, when one of our appliances stops working I will insist on taking it apart, despite evidence that this will just cost me twice as much once the repair person gets here and has to put it back together.

And on that one, I got into a lot of hot water trying to fix the water heater last year. We had to go without hot water for six days, which is pretty hard to do with three daughters, a wife and all their showers and clothes to wash.

This did not come at a good time. We’re not the Inverness gazillionaires every assumes in this part of the north shore. Our house was built about 100 years before everyone else arrived with their McMansions, so I don’t have a wad of home equity cash to fall back on when I need money. The new hot water heater with installation was going to cost about $1000, and I didn’t know where I’d find the cash.

So my daughter went on the Internet and found this for me: a car title loans company that values my Chevy Van for collateral. I went on the computer at work and filled out the forms at Inverness Title Loans, and the money arrived the next day. Whew — a relief. And hot water for the girls (to get me OUT of the hot water).

By the way Inverness is near Barrington, South Barrington, Palatine, Lake Zurich, and Hoffman Estates.

The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

That’s something my father taught me years ago. I’ve never felt the need to be first. Just be the smartest.

Which is not a common approach here in Hawthorn Woods, where you have a lot of people used to winning. It got particularly difficult during my divorce, when it seemed the walls were crashing in and I wasn’t sure where I’d find money for the heating bill a few times. Things were tied up in court for months and while I knew everything was going my way in the long run, I found myself literally looking for money for food.

So I talked to my sister who has gone through her own challenges. She said one of my most usable assets is my car – my Mercedes – which I could use for a car title loan. I thought she was crazy at first because no way was I going to go to a scary store where you talk to someone through bulletproof windows. She laughed and told me about online car title loans, specifically at Hawthorn Woods Title Loans, where you do everything from your personal computer. Perfect – I filled out the forms and got my money the next day.

Just two months later I had full title on my house, a monthly alimony check and that title loan was paid off quite easily. It was a terrific bridge loan.

By the way Hawthorne Woods is near Lake Zurich, Barrington, Wauconda, Mundelein, and North Barrington.

My sister is a big cat person, so big that it was getting the best of her.  So we did an intervention with some questions I found online.  They were:

• Do you select your friends based on how well your cats like them?
• Does your desire to collect cats intensify during times of stress?
• Do you buy more than 50 pounds of cat litter a month?
• Do you think it’s cute when your cat swings on your drapes or licks your butter?
• Do you admit to non-cat owners how many cats you really have?
• Do you sleep in the same position all night because it annoys your cats when you move?

She answered yes to every question.  So we sent her to a therapist in Crystal Lake, a recommendation from a friend of mine here in Barrington. This was kind of expensive – $1600 – but we thought better that than her losing her $2500 security deposit on her apartment when she moves.  The good news is she saw she had a problem, and has begun giving the cats away, one by one, to new homes.

The hard part is paying for the therapy.  I agreed that I initiated it, but only to the point of covering half the expense: $800.  It definitely pushed my limits on cash for this time of year, but I found a great answer to that problem.  I found I could get a title loan on my car at Barrington Title Loans because my car is paid off.

It’s now possible to visit my sis without asking to open the windows.  Believe me, you don’t know how much that investment was worthwhile.

By the way Barrington is near Middlebury, Barrington Hills, Inverness, Palatine, and Deer Park.