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Jan 22, 2015    |       60 comments

Vasectomy or Vasecto-nope???

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Can we talk about something a little more…errr, personal today???

If you’re a newer reader, my husband (32 yrs.) and I (31 yrs.) have twin 2.5 year old daughters. We love them oh so much and our roles as parents. Buuuuut, we don’t want to do it over again.

This is something that we’ve thought a LOT about in the past few years. From the beginning husband has always been fairly certain he does not want more children. I waivered a bit more. When the girls were infants I was firmly in the NO MORE KIDS camp. Then around their first birthday I thought….maybe we might try again at some point? Not soon, but someday? I love the idea of having a little boy. And what great helpers would two older sisters be?

Then the romance of those daydreams wore off. In the past year I’ve sold off and/or given away ALL of our baby stuff. The older the girls get the more I think I NEVER want to do the baby stage again. Over Christmas we held friends’ newborns and ooh’d and aww’d over them. When asked if we wanted another of our own I instantly (maybe a little too sharply) replied, “ABSOLUTELY NOT!!!!”

The truth is I really don’t want to do it again. I like the idea of having a boy, but (1) you don’t just get to choose the gender, and (2) I like the idea….but I don’t think I’d like the reality.

I just can’t do it again. The sleepless nights, the endless diapers, the spit up, the breastfeeding woes (I was committed to breastfeeding and did so for 6 months but it was a struggle every single day). Not to mention I had a very difficult pregnancy and came down with HELLP syndrome toward the end. I ended up delivering the twins via emergency c-section when my blood count numbers were plummeting and the doctors were afraid they might lose me. It was traumatic to say the least.

Here’s a snippet I’ve copy/pasted from my personal blog about the experience:

Nurse: *walks into room* – Where’s hubby?

Me: He went to go get some lunch

Nurse: At the cafeteria?

Me: No…..at a fast food place.

Nurse: Will he be back soon?

Me: He should be……why???

Nurse: *nervous giggle* (there’s a pause as she turns away from me, busying herself with something; after a couple minutes she turns, sits on the side of the bed and says): Well…..remember how I drew that blood from you this morning? It turns out that some of your levels are extremely abnormal. In fact, they’re so abnormal that I’ve talked to the attending OB, and she wants to go ahead and deliver your babies today.

The rest was a bit of a blur.

I never want to do it again. Never. Ever. Ever.

So all that being said, I am currently on oral contraceptives. However, I do NOT want to be on birth control the rest of my child-bearing years. I really don’t like introducing hormones into my body at all but I haven’t wanted to risk a pregnancy so I’ve resigned myself to this as a solution for the time being. I’ve played around with various types of birth control options over the years and I really just don’t like any of them. None of them are great long-term options for me.

Know what is???

Chop, chop honey!!! (tee hee)

Yes. A vasectomy.

If I’d known that we were for sure done with children earlier, I would have just requested getting my tubes tied when I was already in for C-section surgery. I wasn’t sure at that time. I am now.

Husband obviously isn’t crazy about the idea of the old snip-snip, but he also knows he doesn’t want more kids.

Plus, many insurance companies pay huge portions of the vasectomy surgery now (many pay the full thing, minus a copay). Alternatively, the cost of a child from birth to 18 is nearly a quarter of a million dollars (according to CNN money)

I’d love to get your opinions on this. Please, please keep your opinions to more financially-based (rather than religiously-based). I’d also love to hear if you have any personal experiences. I have one girlfriend whose husband had a vasectomy after their third child (7 years ago) and now she is LONGING for a fourth child. A vasectomy-reversal is much more costly than a vasectomy and it is more invasive, difficult to recover from, and is not always a guarantee of success. She regrets the vasectomy and has urged me to wait longer until making a final decision. When is the right time for this type of decision (especially since I’ve wavered in the past…I’m firmly in the NO MORE BABIES camp right now, but could I change my mind again in another year???)

Thoughts??? Opinions? Personal experiences??

Jan 21, 2015    |       5 comments

Getting Organized – Finance Style

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When I was married, I managed the books for both of our businesses, did all his payroll, paid all the bills both business and personal, filed all our taxes and was obsessive about keeping my Quickbooks and Quicken files in balance.  I knew where every dime was, when every bill was due, everything.  It was a daily task for me, and by daily, I mean daily.  Fast forward six years almost seven years…

I’ve not maintained a Quicken/Quickbooks file at all.  Yes, on a couple of occasions, I would get it set up, do all the set up to synch my accounts and then promptly and completely forget about it or just plain ignore it.  I have lived by the seat of my pants since then.  Borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, forgetting that I paid Paul and then having to borrow from Jane…and so forth.  I’ve been the queen of knowing exactly how long payments took to come out of my account and then rolling the dice on whether a pay check would come in before then, or using my card and banking on it not hitting the bank until a few days later to buy just that much more time.  It got so bad that I have refused to use paper checks at all, since I couldn’t predict when they would get cashed and frankly, wasn’t really monitoring my accounts that closely.  It was bad, super bad.

I would guesstimate that in my worst years I spent several hundred dollars are year on overdraft fees.  I knew it was wrong, I knew it was dumb, but between the marriage fail, the housing debacle (this is not the recent one, but the two rental homes I have written about previously,) being the sole provider for then two children, well I was a mess.

Now, in the last maybe, year and a half, I have started to get myself in order.  Keeping lists of bills and due dates, monitoring my bank accounts more closely and trying my best to avoid that stupid bank fees.  But I’ve still not returned to my obsessive nature that was we marriage fail.  And now it’s time…

Okay, not necessarily for the obsessive, daily financial craziness, but for a more organized, traditional book-keeping methodology.  So as of this month, I have updated my version (previous 2012) of Quicken Home & Business, begun the set up with my existing budget and categories, etc.  And I am determined to get back into at least a weekly habit of checks and balances as far as budget, planning and business review.

These last seven years have been a long, hard road.  I would like to say that I never signed up to be a single parent, but the fact of the matter is that I would have become a foster parent whether I got married/had biological kids or not.  So I can’t say I didn’t sign up for that part.  I certainly didn’t sign up for it the way it happened.  It wasn’t my plan.  But you know what, I/we are in a really good place right now.  There is a light, not just a light, but a BRIGHT light at the end of this tunnel and we are plugging away for full steam ahead despite setbacks and hardships this past year.

So for your Quicken users, specifically those who may be entrepreneurs/business owners, got any suggestions or tips and tricks to share with me?

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