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“Life Experiences” Archive
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While visiting our families, there was a comment made to us by my family as well as by my in-laws:
You need to move closer to us.
First things first, it is really tough living so far away from family (about 500 miles). I miss them like crazy and it does bother me that our son isn’t able to see his grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles on a more regular basis. We usually visit once per year and then correspond via telephone throughout the year.
I’m often asked about our secret to paying off debt. There is no secret, but one thing that has helped us tremendously is where we live. We enjoy a low cost of living and we have tons of free things to do that match our interests. We can afford to live here. We can’t afford to live where they live. At least not right now, and we especially couldn’t a few years ago when our monthly debt payments were so high.
I’ve been trying to write about this since yesterday. I get so far, and then I get stuck. I think to myself that living so far away is the best thing for our family. But wait - we miss our relatives so it can’t be the best thing. If you think too much into something like this it can drive you batty. I’m not sure what else to say except I hope that we are doing the right thing.
I think a lot of things in life boil down to that. You are just hoping you are doing the right thing, whatever that may be.
Last week we spent time with relatives some 500 or so miles away. I always feel weird not blogging about the trip itself as it is happening, but I’m not one to announce that my home will be vacant for an extended period of time. I wait to discuss the trip after the fact.
It was definitely a long trip. Probably the longest time we have been away from home in some time (8 days). For most of the trip we were staying with family so our cost was low. The biggest expenses were for gas, food (on the drive) and lodging (also during the drive). Once I enter everything into Quicken, I’ll have a better idea of how much we spent. I have a feeling it will be similar to last year’s trip (around $500 if I remember correctly).
I realized a few financial things during this trip:
1.) I’m tired of worrying about our house and our belongings while we are away. I have a renewed zest for selling most of what we have - only leaving the things that we regularly use, can take with us or things of sentimental value that can be locked up securely. I thought we did a great job reducing stuff during last summer’s garage sales. Nope. We can do even better and make a few more bucks while doing it.
2.) Related to #1, I have to get off my tush and get a safe deposit box going to store copies of important documents and all of our pictures. I started scanning things to store electronic copies, but I lost some steam to finish it. I need to get this task done.
3.) I have to go to the doctors and bite the bullet about my knee pain. It has been an ongoing off/on thing for some time now. Sometimes it was brought on with activity, sometimes it wasn’t. I always drive the entire distance because I love to do it and because my husband doesn’t mind being a passenger. For the first time in over 10 years, I couldn’t drive the entire trip. I drove as long as I could before the pain became too much to bear and I was almost in tears. That was even with taking some Tylenol. Who knows where this pain could lead. You can bet that I’ll be making sure our insurance company gets a timely payment from this point forwards!
On another note, I was dealing with limited internet during our trip so some emails have accumulated. Rest assured, I am going through them and replying to them as quickly as possible. My internal schedule is still out of whack, but by mid-week I should probably be back into the groove.
Expect more posts related to our trip this week. There are a couple juicy topics too 
For quite a while now, we have been doing great with reducing our debt. There would be times where I’d look at our finances and see how much we can squeeze out to put towards our debt (or savings). Usually, there was some breathing room. That’s not the case right now.
I feel a little helpless at the moment, and I haven’t felt like this in quite a while. I look at our Quicken file and I can’t do anything. Our account is dangerously close to being in the red at the end of this month. Right now I am preparing myself mentally because we may have to pull more money from our savings account. While we have our emergency fund there to help when we need it, that doesn’t make it any easier to have to use it.
As some of you noticed, I took a break from blogging. Part of it was technical (I changed all of my passwords after my blog was hacked and I misplaced the one sheet I wrote all of them down on - doh!). But part of it was the fact I have been debt-depressed. The series of events so far in June brought my mood down. It didn’t bug me too much when I wrote about it, but the next day when I said I was going to dig into our Quicken file to see how much we could put towards savings (but couldn’t) - that was the kicker.
We have also been anxiously waiting for some medical test results for my husband. They called today and all is well. Whew. That weighed very heavily on my mind. I feel bad about not blogging about it, but sometimes I have to step away from things and get my head back on straight.
I’m still not all that happy about our financial situation right now but I do feel better overall. It’s just one of those lows on the debt reduction roller coaster. I hope that means we are going to kick some debt booty once July rolls around. By then we should have some reimbursements for medical expenses we paid out of pocket and hopefully I will have the one payment an advertiser owes me. I was informed Friday that they had email problems and they are responding to emails sent the last few weeks as quickly as they can. So we’ll see how that plays out.
I do feel silly for letting things like this get to me. Things could be so much worse. I really should be thankful for what we have and not dwelling on what we don’t have. If there is one lesson that really needs to sink into my head during this journey - I think it’s that one right there.
April and May were awesome months. June…not so awesome. A series of events has left me very grateful for our emergency fund. I’m not happy to have to pull from it, but it has to be done.
First of all, our health insurance company didn’t receive our bill payment from our bank. It is no where to be found. Our bank was nice when they called me about what to do. We issued a stop payment on that check and the money was refunded into our account. They told me they would issue another check on Friday.
Friday came and went and I didn’t see a check going out. I thought maybe it was just a delay with showing online. I checked Monday…nothing. Then Tuesday…nothing. Today, I sent out a check myself. A little bit later, I see that the bank sent out a payment today. I knew the double payment could happen but my husband needs to go back to the doctors shortly. We need our insurance reinstated.
Secondly, there are the medical bills and prescriptions that we had to pay out of pocket because our insurance has been cancelled due to non-payment. That was a little unexpected, but we had enough around to cover that.
Lastly, a trusted advertiser on here has not paid me and they are not answering my emails. If you notice an advertiser on here disappear shortly - you’ll know why. I understand if my check was lost in the mail - it happens. I don’t understand why my emails have not been replied to. That concerns me.
That brings me to our savings account. Thank goodness it is there. I pulled out $500 to cover the double insurance payment and to help cover any future medical bills until our health insurance is reinstated. I didn’t really want to touch it, but there isn’t much else we can do at this point.
It will be very interesting to see how June plays out.
I haven’t felt much like blogging the last few days. A series of events left me a bit bummed and with some extra work on my hands.
First up, my husband is sick again. He called me from the doctors office, “They are saying our insurance is cancelled so I had to pay for the full cost of the visit.”
Crap. It shouldn’t be cancelled. We paid it! I called Blue Cross and they said that they didn’t receive payment. I paid this bill via online bill pay, so I called my bank to see if it cleared. According to them, it didn’t clear but it should have been received by Blue Cross.
A claim has been filed and it is put on the top of the list since it is for our health insurance. I have no idea how everything is going to pan out. I’m only a few months into using online bill pay and now I guess I get to really test out the system. I sure hope things are resolved soon before more medical bills come in. The money we already paid has depleted the little buffer I had in our checking account.
Secondly, like many bloggers out there, my blog was hacked. It wasn’t a huge hack (it redirected search traffic) and everything is still here. That’s a good thing. But I feel pretty violated over the whole thing. I spent hours trying to fix everything and in the back of my mind I couldn’t help but wonder why. Why do people feel the need to do things like that? It makes me very sad.
Lastly, my husband needs to change his diet for health reasons. Overall, that is a good thing because all of us will be eating healthier. But after shopping today, it is clear that our new diet is going to increase our grocery costs. We have to say bye-bye to the cheap processed foods that we buy. We should have done that a long time ago, though.
Nothing really major. They are all things that can be fixed or we can work through them. I didn’t get our May spending report finished, so expect to see that tomorrow night.
The Money Blog Network has an interesting writing project going on right now. They want to know what your finances were like 10 years ago. Ten years places us in 1998.
Uh, oh. I remember what happened that year. Although I don’t have the records to back this up, I’m pretty sure we were actually in a better financial position than we are now. That’s the year my husband received a $40,000 inheritance.
Did we save any of it? Nope.
Did we pay off some credit card debt? Actually, yes.
Did we pay off some student loan debt? Sort of. My husband gave his mom $10k so she could pay off loans she took out for my husband’s education. None of the money went towards student loans in our names, though.
Talk about blowing money. Seriously, I have no idea where $10k of that money went. While I used Quicken on my Performa computer to track things back then, I no longer have the file to access. I wish I did. I’d probably want to ground myself.
A running joke between my husband and I is that we should have invested all of that money in Apple. At the time, Apple was still way behind in the computer market. Both my husband and I loved them and I even studied Steve Jobs for an entire class on leadership. If we had invested that inheritance in Apple stock, our finances today would have been a lot different.
Just take a look at this APPL chart from AOL Finance:
Realistically, we could have invested it all and lost it all in the stock market. Apple would have been our pick and it turns out that it would have been one heck of a pick to make back then.
But it didn’t happen. We spent the money. I know for a fact it was gone at least by mid 1999. After that, it was back to buying stuff on credit and living beyond our means. An embarrassing story, but we have learned so much since way back when.
I doubt we’ll have another windfall, but if we did I can guarantee that we will not have a repeat of 1998. What a difference 10 years can make.
On Saturday, we packed up our fishing poles and headed to a secluded lake for a few hours of fishing.
The sun was shining, temps were in the low 60s, you could hear herons, ducks and frogs singing, we caught some deer frolicking at the lake edge, the wind was blowing enough to keep the bugs at bay, and the fish were biting.
Sigh. It doesn’t get much better than that. Wait, we have to add in my son’s screams of joy when he caught his first fish of the season. It was a four-inch sunfish, but I think it delighted him as much as if he caught a 25-inch walleye.
I couldn’t have asked for a more beautiful day. Thank you mother nature. We needed that. It did cost some money because we needed two new reels for our fishing poles and we didn’t have any worms ready so we had to buy some. We also had to buy fishing licenses for the year. Of course, there’s the cost for the gas to drive out to the lake…
In all it probably cost about $50 to be set to fish for the year (except for future gas costs). It is our goal to go out fishing more this summer, and eating our catch since we normally catch and release.
Will we catch $50 worth of fish to eat this summer? It’s hard to tell. I sure hope we do because I love perch dinners! Even if we don’t, the family time together is priceless.
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