Well, At Least We're Not Homeless

I really dislike money. It taunts me. I swear to you it does. My husband has a decent paying job, decent enough for us to be able for me to stay home. But that does not mean that we have excess amounts of it. I don't get my nails done, I don't go tanning, I don't go shopping, we don't go on vacations or go on outings that cost more than a few dollars. Would I like for us to be able to do those things, sure I would! But we just can not afford them. We made the decision for me to stay home with our children when Punk was born. I didn't go to college, I had a decent enough job, but after looking into childcare while I was pregnant, and comparing it to my paycheck. I would have walked away at the end of the week with under $100 in my pocket. We made the decision that less than $400/month would not be enough of a help for our family to have me away from home and have our child and potentially future children spend 10 hours /day with someone who was not a family member. (At that time I had almost an hour commute.)

So, I became a stay-at-home mom. It started out great! When Punk was a baby I spent our days playing peek-a-boo on the living room floor, endless hours gazing into his eyes, and recording every new milestone in his baby book. After the initial adjustment to my life at home with this little person, I started to feel like I wasn't "pulling my share" of the work in our family. I started taking care of our home like it was a paying job (laundry not included in this, I still suck at laundry!), and I took up taking care of our bills.

Our bills are the thorn in my side. I absolutely hate doing them. I hate trying to figure out where our money needs to go, and all of that crap. I am not a "math person" to begin with so it's always been a challenge for me. My husband, on the other hand, is great at it, but for some reason leaves it all up to me. I do not want this job. Occasionally, he'll say, "Don't worry about the bills anymore, I'll take care of them." I'll hand him the bill binder that I put together, think he's finally ridding me of this horrid chore, only to find out that 2 weeks later he has yet to crack it open and I have to scramble to catch everything up.

But this is not the point of this post. I'm just ranting a bit. It seems like with money, we have our ups and down. We'll be going along just fine, everything paid up, a little extra for fun things, and then BOOM! We'll get hit with some big bill and we're stuck playing catch up. That's been us for the last 2 or 3 weeks. I hate catch up. It stresses us both out, and neither of us handle stress well. The idea of a savings account is a joke for us. We just don't have enough coming in to have that kind of safety net..yet. Bad, I know, but I don't think our situation is rare in this country.

So..we've been stressed out. We've been juggling bills. I've been having yard sales so we have a bit extra to pull us through this difficult time. Just one or two more weeks and it should be caught up, but that seems like an eternity to wait. Exhibit A being our phone/internet bill. It was due Friday. There's just not enough to cover it if we want to eat. So it'll probably have to be shut off until THIS Friday when SB's paycheck hits our bank account. Sucks, but there's just not much we can do about it. Feed our children, or be able to get online..hmm..that's a no brainer. We're not poor. We're just struggling. We'll be okay. We just have to get through this tough time.

I've cut us back a ton. We cut back our immense satellite package to a basic one. Funny thing about that is we only lost 4 channels that we actually watch. I'm looking into completely doing away with our home phone service and getting us a Magic Jack. Aldi's has become my favorite place to shop..although, I can't bring myself to buy their meat. I only turn on our central air on the days that the humidity is so bad it's suffocating. And I am regularly using coupons.

We believe that within the next 30-60 days we are going to have a major change (for the good) in the amount of money that is coming into our household, but that is not something I can give the specifics on publicly at this time..but when I can, I can not wait to share it with you all! But until then. I am hoping I don't go prematurely gray. I am hoping my husband doesn't have a stress-induced panic attack. And throughout it all, we're trying our darndest to keep our kids from realizing anything is amiss.

With 3 young children, and at the point we are at in our lives, I know that what we are going through is fairly common. It's just not any fun. And until things turn around, we'll just keep hanging in there. Holding on to our abundance of love. And praying so hard that things get better sooner rather than later.