Hard times are on everyone right now, most everyone anyway. There isn't anybody right now that isn't feeling the squeeze and that makes the squeeze at least feel like it's not got a personal vendetta against me.
I haven't given an update on a very quick little thread I started 1 week ago today. You should know now this is going to be a long post; don't get invested in it if that is an issue because its 3rd shift, the guys I’m taking care of tonight are asleep and I have some enough pinned up stuff to say as I have hours to say them. In that sense, whether anyone reads any of it or all of it is neither here nor there. I've not complained about hard times or any financial things like that to date. That is mostly because whatever financial problem Sarah and I have is a problem we recognize as one that exists solely because of the decisions we ourselves made and not that of a bill collector who calls a lot or a president that I didn’t vote for. I'll give an update on that thread now.
The entire post in less than one paragraph:
What was a "5 month sprint to the finish" of working all the hours I could so we would be out of debt before the baby gets here in August was wiped away in four days of vacation because of a water leak at our house. The sub floor has given way in an small area in one of our bedrooms and in one bathroom. The carpet/laminate floor in the new "baby room" are in a dumpster, soon to be joined by the sheetrock from the walls of the baby room and the walls in the bathroom from the baby room.
I find out sometime this week what our Insurance will cover. I got a bill today from one of the companies aiding in the clean up. To put it absolutely honestly, it broke my heart when I saw the number on the paper. The "sprint" placed me in a regiment that averaged anywhere from 60-90 hours a week taking care of a particularly angry and very often violent man who suffers from mental retardation and mental illness. At the expense of time with Sarah and my son Sam (ashamed as I am to have just said that) I did it to get us to the place where we would say goodbye to the language that I have been fluent in for most of my adult life, debt.
February 1st – With the end in sight, we’ll soon be freed from prison:
Sarah and I have been working towards one thing most of our entire married life. We've been chipping away at our debt, taking the biggest swings we could while maintaining some form of realistic essential living.
Out of the 5 years we have belonged to each other, four and a half of them were spent with our finances belonging to someone else.
Fortunately, we became aware of the habits that we were forming and the reoccurring mistakes in our financial behavior that allowed us to, at the age of 22, decide not to take these behaviors into our 30's and 40's. Most of these 4+ years felt like we would never get there but we understood that trying to get debt free, even with the discouragement, was better than where we were almost certainly going. We stayed relentless, forcing our budget to allow us to make steady and fluid progress.
When I found out Sarah was pregnant I promised her I would do everything I could to finish off all of our debt by the time she delivered the baby so that she could stay home with our two kids, something she wants so much that in a post as ridiculously long as this there aren't enough words.
March 2nd - The day the guards let us see the front gate of our prison:
Sarah and I went together and we handed a check for $3,600.00 to a lady at the front desk of Consumer Credit Counseling Service. Placing that check into the hands of the person reviewing our account meant more to us than the $3,600.00 that was printed on it. It meant that we started something and we finished it and it meant that we made up for our failures. For reference for those that don’t know me, $3,600 isn’t far from the most money I’ve physically seen at one time; it was a big deal for us.
We had planned a lunch date to celebrate the steadfastness we learned together. Instead of mailing in that check we gave ourselves enough time to go in person, and together pay our last 'non-vehicle” bill. We walked into that place as people who were owing, taking off the obligation of ownership to anybody but ourselves, leaving with the wisdom of two people who acknowledge fully the price of their own mistakes.
It was a new beginning, not a beginning of lessons being learned and acknowledging are faults. Those lessons had already been learned and the understanding of how we got where we were had already been understood with exhaustion. We recognized our faults and our shortcomings and vowed to each other to at least give an attempt to have some commonsense while being taken advantage of those who are willing to do so. We needed to become educated in how things worked before we made big decisions and our mistakes were paying for a top rate education. This vow came at the expense of a 27% interest rate on a car we bought a few years back, driving off the lot too young to comprehend what had just happened to us.
Later in this same week we used our tax returns to pay my vehicle down to a thousand bucks. And with that began the home stretch of not having to give the automatic yes every time my cell phone rings, asking if I could work third shift even though I’m just finishing up 2nd and wanted to spend the night at my house with Sam and Sarah .
Ironically while this is going on I'm juggling classes in college where I'm majoring in Journalism in hopes of becoming a columnist. The newspaper industry, an industry that I love and feel like I belong, I watch on as newspapers are struggling to keep their heads above water. I feel like we’re family.
It was 15 days before my next paycheck and we were more than aware that the amount of hours I put in these past few weeks would cover what was needed to finish off our very last bill and begin a new chapter where the only person we owed anything to was each other.
March 5th - The guards walk us back to our jail cell.
Sarah and I had an extra $200 dollars that we were saving. My father and mother were taking an Allegiant Air flight to Tampa for his birthday and asked if we could go. The flight was leaving on Friday at 9:00 and we were having this conversation exactly 20 hours earlier. We talked about it in the early afternoon and came to realize that it wouldn’t be too much longer before Sarah would be in no condition to travel with any amount of comfort or enjoyment and that we better make the best of the opportunity and enjoy the last vacation we will take having only one child.
Between Allegiant Air and Priceline.com we got 2 round trip tickets, a rental car and 3 nights at the Holiday Inn Express for our $200.00 dollars. It was the best money we had spent in a while. Another big draw for Sarah and I deciding to go on the trip was that all of Sarah's family and relatives are in Tampa. When we married she gave up Florida for moving to Chattanooga. The reason this trip was so important to her is because before this, none of her family had seen Sam. For the first time, Sarah could go and show her family her accomplishments.
When we walked back into our house we saw the water. We quickly accumulated a pile of soaked towels in our ignorant efforts to remedy the damage that had already taken place. After a couple of people on the boards gave me a brief education on the damage that water can cause it became clear that the one thing I had to do was start by taking the majorities advice and get the water dry. This came in the form of a water salvage crew coming to the house to begin unveiling the story of what all happened these last 4 days.
With each layer they pulled up I started to realize that my worrying about our carpet being damaged was like being on the Titanic and getting bummed out because I forgot my swimming trunks.
I can see the basement from the stripped through cracks where the subfloor is swelling. My duct work needs to be replaced from the water that had poured down them (and inevitably into the central heat & air unit), the bottom of the sheetrock walls are starting to crumble in the baby’s room as they are drying and in both bathrooms and two closets. The laminate floor in our living room has separated even though it was not in what appeared to be any "contact" with any water. With our older home the water found it's way to each crack and crevice in the floor. Under walls, across rooms, and eventually below the house. Various other things such as insulation that is sitting in a sogging pile underneath my house and having to paint a few rooms will surely be added to the "labor and nuisance" part of restoration and not so much the financial jab-hook combo.
In back to back days, following the problems with the house, both of our cars confirmed in Grande fashion (I spelled Grande with an “e” for emphasis) what I already knew. Don’t think that finding relaxation in the 80 degree beaches of Florida in March, while being surrounded by the people in your life that mean the most to you, will result in anything other than a welcome home by whatever causes non-lethal heart attacks and will make sure you still remember what it feels like to be broken on the wheels of living.
The Good:
No matter what happens through any of this, if the insurance pays for most of it or we pay for all of it, our new son or daughter will have a room that is cleaner and newer than what she/he would have had if this had not happened. I find a big comfort in that.
There was 100-150 pounds of water in my central heat and air return from a duct that was very close to where the leak originated. Though I’m in for new duct work, had that water gone out into the house instead of down the duct there’s no telling how much more damage there might have been.
If we do end up having to pay what the bills are saying and insurance doesn’t cover them, it’s important to dilute the berating of it being as if all of the work was for nothing and understand the reality of the matter is that this is what happens to homeowners and that because of Sarah and I continue indeed paid those bills we now have a lot likelier chance at being able to handle whatever payments this may accrue since our money isn’t going to other things.
I hated our bath tub and it has to be removed (simple things)
