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Feb 15, 2019    |       45 comments

Nothing like a Medical Emergency…

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To give you perspective. Sea Cadet (and I) spent most of this week in the local hospital. He had two surgical procedures, and will have to monitor himself for the next month before a follow up appointment.

When I took him in Sunday night, I thought it was most likely his appendix. But it wasn’t. (I won’t go into detail to respect his privacy.) And he will be fine in the long run.

Sea Cadet after surgery

Sea Cadet after his second surgery

We have learned several lessons from this week:

  1. Listen to your body. As a family who tends to avoid doctors for the most part, there are times when getting things checked out is very important.
  2. Communication is key. Our local hospital is very small. The service has been fantastic. But we received lots of mixed messages. Go home, no stay. Surgery at 10, no 8:30am. Take this medicine, no this one. When working in a team or family even, being clear on your communication is very important.
  3. Health insurance. To be honest, the jury is still out on this for me. But I had multiple interesting discussions with other patients, concerned families and so on about its usefulness or lack thereof. Sea Cadet does not have any health insurance, so it will be interesting to see how the financial aspect of this plays out.
  4. Having the flexibility to work from wherever is fantastic when you have a child in crisis. Thankfully, I did not miss a beat at work. I was able to to set up shop in his hospital room, the cafeteria, the waiting room and the recovery room. I am so grateful for this (and for how wonderful my clients have been this week.)

In the end, I had to pay $40 as a copay for the hospital to treat him with no insurance. And his medications have cost less than $30 – antibiotics and pain medicine.

We are not panicking at this point. He has applied for reduced cost medical treated, a service offered by the hospital, and we will wait until the bills start coming in to figure out a game plan. Because he is an adult, I am not legally responsible for these bills, but as a parent, I will try to help as much as I can.

Have you had a medical crisis that caused such distress? Any tricks with dealing with the financial repercussions?

 

Feb 13, 2019    |       10 comments

A Huge Oversight In My New Budget

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This is a religious, christian-faith post about my personal decision to start tithing. As this concept may not be understood by those outside of the faith, please note that I am journaling my personal decisions and walk.

In my journey to be debt free, I have been almost exclusively focused on saving money. I didn’t tithe because at its simplest theoretical level, I considered tithing as giving away money that I could allocate toward debt-reduction or saving. And this was counteractive to my goals. But theological principles explains that tithing is returning a portion of income that belonged to God to start with.  

Here’s the thing- none of this information was new to me. I simply disregarded tithing because I thought that it did not directly contribute to my financial goals. To be completely honest, I will admit that it has been months, years even, since I have tithed. Perhaps this was because I had let my relationship with God become less and less of a priority until it wasn’t one at all.

But at the beginning of this year I made the decision to return to God fully, giving my heart and actions. Two Sundays ago, I went to church for the first time in the city that I live in and I made a small offering of under $20.

I’ve also realized that despite my financial situation, I can still afford to be charitable and to have a giving spirit. I know that there are some people that would gladly trade me for my debt. So I strive to be more generous, which I’ll also admit that, as a tight budgeter, does not come naturally or easily to me.

But God reminded me of the power of giving without strings attached. I have been looking for a quality part time job for months and instead did odd things like substitute teach when it was convenient in the meantime. Last Friday, I was offered a part-time job for about $30 an hour. I got the offer out of the blue and I know that this was not circumstance. I will start this job in a few weeks and should have my credit card paid off even faster than my original plan.

Not only did this happen, but I just found out that I will also be receiving additional pay this month. I have been putting in many extra hours after the workday to work on a project. (That’s right! The day hardly ever ends after the students go home for the many people that think educators leave work around 3 p.m.) This is simply the culture of schools and no one expects to get paid overtime. In my years of being an educator, I don’t know if I ever have. However, I was informed this week that I would be getting paid for the extra hours that I recently put in. I already have that money earmarked. With the combination of this surplus money and the income from my part time job, I will have my Bank of America balance paid in full with my March paycheck and April at the latest. I will keep you updated on this payoff date.

I’m sure that none of this was by coincidence. After only planting a small seed, I have been given a great part time job and also received extra pay. I will give my full tithe ($300 or 10% of my $3,000 income) to the church this month. A key factor in monthly tithing is being intentional about it in my budget as I would any other priority so that it does not become forgotten. I will have to modify my March budget and will do so with a grateful spirit.

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