Accept that some days you’re the pigeon, and some days you’re the statue.

I’m just old enough, a senior at Loyola, to know that one.  And that education started at Lake Park H.S. before that.  I know that money comes, money goes and you’re smart not to spend more than you have.

But at the same time, everyone I know from Roselle where I grew up agrees that you have to borrow money in this life. My tuition would be unaffordable if I had to pay for it now. That’s why I and everyone else takes out student loans. It’s an investment.

I had to take out as different kind of loan reacently, a car title loan. For reasons too complicated to go into, I had to hire a lawyer, and she wanted some money upfront, about $500.  I barely make enough money to buy my food, so that seemed like an impossible amount – but what choice did I have? That’s when car title loans started to make sense to me.  I went to Roselle Title Loans, where they got me money for my old 98 Volvo, and which I can pay back on my schedule.

It was a situation where I definitely was the statue, and I had to go after the pigeons.  The good news is I WON.

By the way Roselle is near Bloomingdale, Hanover Park, Itasca, Medinah, and Wood Dale.

What happens if you confuse your Valium with your birth control pills?
You have 12 kids, but you don’t really care.

I told that joke to my friend Sandeep’s mother, who is an OB-GYN. She didn’t really think it was so funny.

Irony is kinda lacking around here in Medinah. I don’t play golf, but I just don’t see any Caddyshack moments out there at the Medinah Country Club.

So I gotta find a way out of this place. I’ve been going to the College of DuPage for about four semesters, but ran up against certain financial difficulties over the last semester break that threatened even that ticket out of here. I was short $500 in tuition money and didn’t really have a way to find it anywhere. That is, until I looked at my car, a 10 year old beater (actually, it’s Sandeep’s mother’s old Saab that she practically gave me) and I remember hearing about car title loans. I went online to Medinah Title Loans, where I picked up that $500 just in time to enroll for the semester. With my parttime job in Roselle, I am paying off that car title loan in less than a month. No valium required!

By the way Medinah is near Bloomingdale, Roselle, Elk Grove, Itasca, and Hanover Park.

Because I’m a man, when the car isn’t running very well, I will pop the hood and stare at the engine as if I know what I’m looking at. If another man shows up, one of us will say to the other, “I used to be able to fix these things, but now with all these computers and everything, I wouldn’t know where to start.” We will then drink beer.

This is how we live in the Ranchettes part of Itasca, where I was born and raised and now live as an adult in the house I grew up in. For the most part, it’s a happy life.  But the transmission blew on the car a few months ago and I knew I didn’t have the cash to fix it, and that meant I also lacked for money for a down payment on something new. Not good.

But I know the Internet and knew I could at least find some ideas there.  I looked for loans on home equity, which are actually harder today to get than a couple years ago (and my dad holds the title there, so that wouldn’t go over well).  Then I found car title loans, specifically Itasca Title Loans online.  The were able to finance the car repair with the book value of the car.  I got the cash in one day, enough to get the transmission replaced in less than three days.

After that, I sat down and had a beer.

By the way Itasca is near, Medinah, Roselle, Bloomingdale, Bensenville, and Elk Grove.

I’m one bad relationship away from having 30 cats.  My last boyfriend, Xavier, left me because he decided recently he should be dating latinas.  This just occurred to him?

That wasn’t the only thing he left me.  I got stuck paying for my apartment by myself, and in the three months it took for me to get a new roommate, I got behind by $900.  I don’t have credit cards anymore, so that meant I couldn’t pay rent one month and other bills too.  I didn’t know what to do, so I went on the Internet and looked for ways of getting loans.  My friend said it would be impossible in this economy, especially since I have bad credit.  But I found out about car title loans – loans you can get if your car is paid for.  That’s me! I bought my Saturn used, for cash, three years ago.

So I decided to go with Hanover Park Title Loans, a car title loan company that works online.  You just fill out the forms, get approved almost instantly, and the cash is sent electronically, so you don’t even have to wait for a check to clear.

Meanwhile, the new roommate and I are talking about getting a cat.  The first cat.

By the way Hanover Park is near Schaumburg, Bloomingdale, Addison, Elmhurst, and Hoffman Estates.

There are lot of things in life I don’t know. Like, what hair color do the put on the driver’s licenses of bald men?

But I recently learned an important lesson in personal finance. I had allowed my credit card charges to build up. Here in DuPage County, we’re a little too caught up in keeping up appearances, so this economic slow down doesn’t stop many of us from spending money. My husband and I decided we still deserved vacations last year, and some good clothes for work, and dinners out in restaurants in Chicago. And then wham!, all of a sudden we ran into some big financial hits that took away our ability to pay some credit card bills on time. It was then that I noticed our interest charges had climbed to 28%!

So I went on the Internet and learned about car title loans. Both our cars are older (five years and six years), but the good thing is they’re paid for. We figured out we could borrow against our car title and do better with that than carry those big credit card balances. My friends couldn’t believe it. So I sent them to our car title loan lender, DuPage County Title Loans. Two of my friends did the same thing we did. It’s easy, takes about ten minutes to do, and you get your money fast — in time to pay off the ugliest of bills.

Bald men and their driver’s licenses are something I still don’t know.  But car title loans I understand and recommend.

By the way Dupage County is near Batavia, Warrenville, Wheaton, Glendale Heights, and Bloomingdale.

My brother is blinded by blondes. I swear, he has dated at least half of every blonde bimbo in DuPage County. If you put them all in a room together, the noise would be bimbabble. If you told them the sky was down, they’d be bimbaffled. They all wear bimbait (short skirts, sheer blouses, etc.). He meets them at the Bimbars in Naperville.

He’s just as dumb when it comes to finances. He was all bent out of shape a few months ago because he had a major car repair bill on his Saab Turbo (it seems the Turbos cost about $5000 to replace) right when he was trying to buy a house. He was stretched really thin, didn’t want to run up big charges on his cards because of how it would affect his credit rating. Yet he was in no position to buy a new car, either.

I told him he needs to leverage his car’s value with a car title loan. He had never heard of car title loans. I sent him to Carol Stream Title Loans, because they allow you to do it online. You just enter your info, you get approved in like minutes (“like minutes,” gawd, I’m sound like one of his bimboettes!), and your money comes in the next day. He took the car right down to the shop, got it fixed, and went on a date. Waste no time blondeless.

Lucky for him he has a smart (brunette, of course) sister.

By the way Carol Stream is near Glendale Heights, Bloomingdale, Winfield, Glen Ellyn, and Lombard.

My hunky husband is great to look at. Etcetera. And I’m a happy woman. But no one pretends he’s the sharpest knife in the drawer. When we were first dating, I told him I would only engage in safe sex. His response? “You mean that’s when we lock the door?”

So needless to say, he’s also not the breadwinner around the house. Typically, that’s my job. And it doesn’t hurt that I’m a lawyer. Except late last year I was laid off and in this economy my area of specialization doesn’t offer a lot of jobs. Before we could manage costs down to what we could afford, the bills got ahead of me. I was determined not to let my credit rating go into the toilet because of this temporary situation.

So one month when payments due were about $2500 greater than available funds, the big lunk actually had a good idea. A friend of his at his gym on Army Trail Road in Glendale Heights had used Bloomingdale Title Loans to get cash from his car. My Chrysler is paid for, so I have value in it – but I wasn’t about to sell it because I’ll obviously need it when I get a new job. I went to their online application, filled it out in about ten minutes, and in a day I had the cash needed to cover the bills. A car title loan makes sense sometimes under special circumstances.

I’m working part time again in Chicago and paying off that loan just fine. And with more time at home, I get to enjoy my marriage a little more. With the door locked, and sometimes not .

By the way Bloomingdale is near Glendale Heights, Carol Stream, Glen Ellyn, Lombard, and Wheaton.

My mother has been haggling me to get married for about 23 years. She says it’s just not right for a girl in Bartlett to be single after the age of 30. Sheesh. Lately she’s been on my case about how I’ve allowed my cats (four of them) to “fill a void” in my life. She clipped these questions from the Internet that she thinks identifies my problem:

• Do you kiss your cat on the whiskers?
• Do you feed your cat tidbits from the table with your fork?
• Does your cat sleep on your head?
• Do you like it?
• Do you have more than four opened but rejected cans of cat food in the refrigerator?
• Do you watch bad TV because the cat is sleeping on the remote?
• Will you stand at the open door indefinitely in the freezing rain while your cat sniffs the door, deciding whether to go out or come in?

I answered yes to all of them, so I guess I’m guilty. So here’s the rub: She insisted I go on a cruise to meet a man. It seemed like a good idea at the time. So I plunked down my Visa to go on a 9 day cruise to meet the man of my dreams. Unfortunately, I only seemed to meet guys with toupees who were dreaming that a girl wouldn’t notice such a thing (I actually said to one guy, “is that a cat on your head?”). What I ended up with was a $2300 Visa bill just when my company laid off more than a thousand people, including me.

The cats stayed, fortunately, and so I wasn’t all alone in this problem. Next, I discovered I could get some money to cover the Visa charges until I find a new job. My source? Bartlett Title Loans, a car title loan company that lends money based on the title to your car. My Rav-4 has been handy for trips to the vet and a lot else. But now it’s where I find cash when in a pinch. Good deal!

By the way Bartlett is near Bloomingdale, Schaumburg, Elk Grove Village, Carol Stream, and Addison.