My Debt Reduction Blog

I’m still alive and still in debt. I am still married. My wife still has not gotten a teaching job since she’s gotten her teacher certification back in June. Times are tough and reserves are running out.

Let’s just says the last six months have been a rather rough roller coaster ride. Financial and marital problems can really take a toll on ones motivation. There have been no big improvements on either front to speak of unfortunately. In fact, financially, I put us a little deeper by buying a new TV and a Nintendo Wii recently. I certainly didn’t need these items, but I’m glad I bought them. They have provided a form of bonding and fun times for our family. Something that was desperately needed.

With school ending soon, my wifes student teaching is also coming to an end. She will have her certification in a couple of weeks and can officially get a teaching job. But the local need for teachers right now is a bit bleak. I don’t predict her landing a job anytime soon unfortunately.

So, there’s a quick update in to the happenings here. Thanks for hanging around. And, as usual, I plan to start posting more.

Please forgive this majorly off-topic post, but I don’t want to start another website to showcase additional turmoil in my life.

There are a few reasons why this website has seen so much neglect over the past few months, but the major reason has been the fact that my marriage has been on the brink of utter disaster. So many factors have played into why our marriage is teetering right now, and I won’t go in to all the details, but I will say that our financial situation isn’t one of the factors. There have been mistakes made by both of us. There have been things said, that both regret. This has been something that has been in the works for a couple of years. It came to a head September of 2007 when I was awoken to just how bad it was.

In October we both agreed to start seeing a counsellor and we continued to the end of January of 2008. During that time we had ups and downs, but overall nothing improved. We mutually agreed that this particular counsellor wasn’t doing anything for us. After we stopped going to counselling, things continued to get worse. So much so that on February 15th I packed my bags and told her I would not be coming home after work that day or ever again and I wouldn’t tell her where I’d be, but I’d be reachable via cell phone. She asked that if we could talk face to face after she came home from work before I took off. I agreed to that and ended up calling in sick to work and just staying home to try and relax.

Something that I should mention is that because of all of this I was under extreme anxiety and had feelings of depression. One of the last things our counsellor suggested to me was to try some anxiety medication to help cope with the marital issues we were facing, because I always dwelled on the current negatives and never on the positives. So I saw my doctor and explained what was going on and he prescribed me something called Paroxetine. It came with the warning of a lot of side effects that I would probably experience during the first three weeks. And I had them all. It was a miserable 3 weeks, and my packing up to leave happened right in the middle of all that. I was also prescribed Xanex to help me relax at night and to help me sleep. That stuff works great.

Ok, on to the point of this post as we’re starting to get up to date. On the 15th when we had our talk, we both agreed that neither one of us wants to call it quits, but with her student teaching, going to school one night a week, and working a part time job, that she just can’t give much to the relationship right now. I never left, and my medication is working in full force now without the crappy side effects.

We’ve just been taking it day by day. I’ve backed off on the ‘always wanting to talk about us’ approach that never seemed to do anything other than drive her away. And the medications have helped with that. Just last week, we started with a new therapist, and right away, her approach seems way different. She recommended a book, called The Seven Principles For Making Marriage Work, which I ordered right away from good old Amazon. I’m about half way through the book already and it’s really good.

There is still plenty of tension between us, and when we’re in the same room together, it’s still somewhat uncomfortable. We do a ton of text messaging with each other though. And what’s really cool, is that we have normal, good conversations via our phones. Something we haven’t been able to do face to face for a long time. I really think that all the text messaging has helped us in a non direct way.

Over the last week, she has been talkative and will actually sit down by me. As weird as it sounds, that feels really good when she does. I’d really like to think that some stuff is turning around for us. It isn’t an earth shattering turn around, but it is something. And I also think that all the text messaging that we do, played a major role in getting us to start communicating again while we’re in the same room.

My wife has been going to school to become a teacher, and now her time to start student teaching has arrived. What does this mean for us? Well, it’s actually quite substantial. It means she had to quit her full time job, which also provided all our family insurance needs, so she can take over an actual class full time for six months for no salary. Her last day was last Friday and she starts student teaching this Monday. While she wasn’t making a ton of money at her job, we still needed every penny to get through every month.

I really don’t know what is going to happen over the next six months. She has picked up a part time job, but it’s not nearly enough to help us cover our current monthly expenses. We’re hoping to get our taxes filed right away so our return can cover a couple of months. And this weekend I’ll be scouring the house looking for items to sell. Other than that, we can only wait to see what happens.

When student teaching is over, she will then get her teacher certification and can start applying for teaching jobs. And with any luck she will land one before the start of the next school year. If that happens, she would then be making about 15k/yr more than she was at the job she just quit. Plus our girls will be starting kindergarten this fall, which means no more pre-school costs(saving us over $17,000/yr). So the second half the year could end up being a real boost for us.

Only time will tell.

Even though it’s been over a month and a half since my last post, I haven’t given up my debt reduction blog. Just, took a little time off. Well, it really was a lot deeper of a reason than that. Life’s been a wee bit rough on our household. I’m hoping to get back in to the swing of things now that the ‘rough stuff’ has leveled out. Besides we’ve had some financial changes over the last month and there are some HUGE ones coming up.

Be back soon with an actual on-topic post.

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I’ve been trying really hard to bring a lunch every day to work. By doing that, I could probably save between $25 - $30 a week. But every day around 11 they start passing around the menu and it’s so tempting to order. I’ve been guilty in the past of even having food here and still ordering something and letting the food I brought go to waste. I’m turning that bad habit around this also.

Over the last week, I moved and made a modification to our emergency fund. First, the magic number everyone throws around it having $1,000 for an emergency fund. Well, I’ve decided to bump it up to $1,500. This decision was made a few weeks ago when I had to use $500 of it. It seemed weird to use $500 and notice that 50% of the emergency fund is gone. I’ve since replenished the fund and brought it up to $1,500.

The other change made was I moved it from our ING savings to our local bank where we have our checking account. It became apparent a few weeks ago when I needed use some of it, that ING wasn’t the best place for it. Had it been a true emergency, I would have been screwed as it took 4 or 5 days to get the money into our checking account.

So to review; I’ve increased our emergency fund to $1,500 and I moved it to a savings account at our local bank fir quicker access.

Yup, you read that correctly. Certainly not what you should be reading on a blog of a family trying to get out of debt, but it is true. My feet have been hurting from my old and worn out work shoes, and I’ve been looking for a long time for a nice ‘inexpensive’ pair of shoes, but haven’t had much luck. Well, mom to the rescue; she insisted that I go to a local ‘old style’ shoe store where they actually fit you and sell high quality shoes. Then she would reimburse me. It’s been a long time, probably since I was a kid, since I went to a full service shoe store. Well, I ended up buying the first pair of shoes I tried on. They fit really well, and weren’t the most expensive shoes they had at $110. The good news was they were having a sale and all shoes were $10 off, so total cost with tax was $105.50.

It felt so good to have a nice, new pair of shoes that I fell victim to the near by starbucks, and wanted one more treat. I got myself a medium white chocolate mocha. I hate paying $4 for a drink, but I love that drink.

So there, I fell a bit off the debt wagon, but really only by $4.

I know we need one, heck, everyone should have one. But why don’t I? Is it because I’m a procrastinator? Is it because I have no idea how to create one? Is it because I still don’t have grips on all our expenses? Or is it that I’m just full of excuses and lazy?

I started this blog to help me keep focused on our goal, but I am still missing the key ingredient to this debt elimination recipe. That must change!