Getting Back on Track

As I have mentioned in a previous post, my husband was out of work for over a year after losing his job early last year.  He was able to collect unemployment for six months, which helped us to at least pay the necessities, After that ran out, we really struggled to keep up with the rent, electric bill, cell phone bill, internet, and food on just my income and two growing teenagers in the house.  We did luck out when we won a trip to the super bowl and were able to sell the tickets to the game.  That helped us catch up on our rent and other bills that had fallen behind, but didn't last as long as we had hoped.

My husband finally started a new job about a month ago, but are still trying to catch up on our electric bill and get back to being able to pay our rent on time since he has only received two paychecks so far.  His job is commission only so it's driving me crazy not being able to plan ahead and figure out how long it will take us to get back on track and start paying down our debt again.  In his line of work, he has always been paid commission and not a regular salary so that is not new to me, but at a time like this it makes me crazy because I love to plan for the future!  To make matters worse, my paycheck is now being garnished for an old debt since I have not been able to pay it during this past year.  This eats up about 20% of my paycheck.  On the bright side, that debt should be done after three more checks and that is one less debt and $1800 to remove from our total debt.

During this difficult time, we have really cut back on a lot of things!  Most of these things I tried to do before, but my husband wouldn't have it.  His philosophy on money was always "I can't take it with me".  Money is one of few things we disagree on.  It took me a while to convince my husband these changes were necessary, even after he lost his job.  But he eventually came to his senses and realized he was being selfish and unrealistic.

We have cut expenses on many things during this last year.  We never eat out, with the exception of my husband eating fast food for lunch on occasion (I'm still working on that one).  We completely cancelled cable.  We use my mother-in-law's Netflix account and we pay for Hulu Premium for $7.99 per month.  Cancelling cable really took some convincing for my husband.  I had to tell him we had no other options and it was a luxury that if we continued to keep, would cause us to become homeless.  The funny part about it is after we cancelled it and subscribed to Hulu premium he said he doesn't even miss it anymore.  The only thing he misses out on is some sports, but he is able to catch most things online somewhere or on basic channels.  But then, as soon as he found out he got his job, the first thing he mentioned was getting cable back!  No!!!!  I told him "why would we add another $150 monthly bill for something you didn't even miss and won't get to enjoy much of now that you're working anyway?"  He hasn't brought it up since.

I've been rolling my own cigarettes for quite a while now, which saves me $124 a month.  We very rarely drink alcohol anymore, not that we drank a lot before, but we did used to go out probably at least once a month and that no longer happens at all.  If we do drink, it's something we make at home and is so rare that it costs us virtually nothing.  I've been making our own bread in our bread machine and we bought a Soda Stream, which saves us a little.  I'm working on putting together some numbers for future posts on those although I fear we aren't saving as much as I thought we would when we bought the Soda Stream because now my son has an endless supply of soda.  We never buy clothes unless absolutely necessary.  If it is necessary, we try the thrift stores.  My daughter starts a summer job next week that requires business casual attire and she really has nothing to wear so we will have to hit up some thrift shops this weekend to at least get her a few outfits for work.

The next thing I'm working on is switching our cell phone carrier from AT&T to Cricket.  My husband is really against this too.  I'm still trying to figure out his reasoning on this one.  It makes zero sense to me to stay with AT&T when we can switch to Cricket and lower our bill from $255 per month to $100 per month (4 phones).  He actually got AT&T on the phone and talked to them for over an hour trying to convince them to lower our bill to keep us with them and the best they would do is shave off $20 a month.  I'll take it for now, but we're still switching!  He did, however, convince them to send a new phone for my daughter without insurance and without putting it under a contract (hers broke).  So right now we have two of the four phones completely out of contract so the plan is to switch those over to Cricket within the next week.  That leaves us with two phones under contract with AT&T and since we don't have the extra money right now to pay the early termination fees, we will have to wait until we can come up with it.  This will be first priority once our rent and electric and caught up.  I've done all the research and math and we can bring all of our current phones over to Cricket and will only need to pay $25 activation fees for each one plus 1 penny for each new sim card.  To start with, switching just the two of them over to Cricket will only save us about $8.44 a month.  This is because of the way AT&T prices two phones verses four and Cricket offers additional discounts for each additional phone.  But it's still savings.  If we were able to switch all four phones now it would be worth it even with paying the early cancellation fees.  If we could switch them all now, we would save $1000 in our first year with Cricket, including the early termination fees and activation fees.  Every year after that, we will save $1,860.

I have to say the only things we have splurged on at all is the soda and cigarettes.  I know we could save more money by cutting those out altogether, but I'm just not ready to quit smoking.  I do, however, want to start drinking less soda and more water.  This time of year I tend to drink more water anyway so my goal is to quit soda completely and stick to water, not only for the cost savings, but for my health too.

Does anyone else have any great saving techniques, ideas, or want to share what your weaknesses are when it comes to splurging?

The New Middle Class

I'm feeling a little down lately because we've had some bumps in the road and are getting nowhere with our financial goals.  In fact, things have only gotten worse.  Today is the day for me to let loose and voice my frustrations with today's society.  I am a supervisor at a large company where I earn $45,000 annually.  I have two children.  I currently receive $700 monthly in child support, but that will be cut in half in a few months due to my oldest child graduating high school.  My oldest child will continue to live at home and go to a local respectable college.  She will work full time this summer, but most likely will not be able to work much while in school.  Fortunately, she has received lots of scholarship money and grants and will cost us very little out of pocket, but she will graduate with $10,000 - $20,000 in student loans.

I am married and my husband has three adult children of his own as well as one grandchild.  It is just the four of us in our household, myself, my husband, and my two children.  My youngest child is 14.  My husband lost his job over a year ago.  Hubby will be starting a new job in a few days.  It is a sales position that is paid based on commission only so that makes it difficult to plan ahead, which frustrates me to no end.  He has always had variable income in his previous jobs as well.  One would think that a couple like us would make enough money to live comfortably, have a decent house, decent cars, and take a vacation or two a year.  Unfortunately, that is far from the case.  We live in a small 3 bedroom apartment in an ok neighborhood, have two old cars that we are constantly putting money into (although not more than car payments would be), and the only vacation we have taken in several years is our free trip to Phoenix that we won (which I am very thankful for).  This was the case even before he lost his job over a year ago.  

How can this be?  We have no credit cards, no car payments, and the only debt we have is student loans and medical debt.  Neither one of us have a degree.  Hubby went to college after high school, but dropped out halfway through due to the birth of his first child.  I had my first child at 18, but have taken classes off and on over the years.  I have not been able to finish yet due to being stuck in my salary job working long hours and not getting paid overtime for it.  Ironically, the company offers tuition reimbursement, but they are not allowing me to take advantage of it.  The department I run cannot continue to function on the amount of people we have due to the recent drastic growth in business.  However, they will not allow me to hire more people so I am stuck working endless hours trying to keep up with the work.  I would love to find a new job, but am having no luck finding anything paying anywhere close to what I'm making now since I have no degree.  

I am not going to knock anyone with a degree because I truly believe everyone should continue to educate themselves always.  I am constantly reading and researching things to educate myself.  However, I see the company I work for continue to hire fresh out of college students who have been spoon fed their whole lives and accomplish practically nothing and when you bring an error to their attention they shrug it off even though you just told them it took you 30 minutes to correct the mess they made.  What happened to hard workers who care about the work they do and how it affects the company?  Since when did a piece of paper replace years of actual experience?  

So how do we spend our money?  Rent, food, electricity, gasoline, cell phones, internet, school fees, etc.  I do smoke, but I roll my own cigarettes and save a ton of money doing this.  I only spend roughly $60/month on cigarettes.  We don't drink or have any other bad habits.  We don't go to the movies, mall, bowling, or any other extra curricular activity that costs money.  We sit at home and watch Hulu and Netflix.  I spend my spare time surfing the web, mostly searching for more ways to save money.  We rarely buy clothes and when we do, we try thrift shops first.  

What does it take to be able to earn enough money to enjoy life once in a while?  I started this blog as a way to try to help others with their personal finances, a topic that I absolutely love and have read so much on.  But when I can't even keep my own finances in order, how am I supposed to help others?  The cost of everything is increasing at a staggering rate, but yet we continue to only receive 3% cost of living raises.  I'm starting to think I should just give up and go on welfare because I will be living the same lifestyle and not have to work my butt off in the process.  During this last year while my husband was out of work, I checked to see what the limits are for free and reduced school lunches.  Our annual income was just $200 too much to qualify for reduced lunches.  We make way too much to qualify for low income housing, which by the way is way larger than an apartment or house that we can afford otherwise.  There is a low income housing community 1/4 of a mile down the road from us.  Their monthly rent is way cheaper than ours and the apartments are larger.  There are even large 4 bedroom houses that are still cheaper than we pay in rent.  .  

Meanwhile, our apartment complex is under new management.  They keep increasing our rent even though they haven't made a single improvement to our apartment other than the trim color on the exterior.  But they have completely remodeled the rental office and work out room that I never get to see since it's only open during office hours and I am always at work.  I try to look for other places to live, but since we paid our rent 20 days late one time, they sent it to court the day after we paid it anyway and now we have an eviction on our record even though we weren't really evicted and paid it the day before the court date.  No one else will rent to us with that on our record.  

Don't get me started on healthcare either!  Fortunately my kids are covered on their father's insurance.  I have insurance for myself through work, which costs me $200 per month for a high deductible plan.  I also contribute $186 per month into my HSA account.  We cannot afford to insure my husband because my company only offers two plans: single and family.  The family plan costs $700 per month.  Soon he will be able to get insurance cheaper through his new job.  

I am convinced that the middle class is now the poorest class.  We pay the highest taxes, we get 0 breaks, pay 100% inflation, and get 3% pay raises.  Am I the only one feeling this way?  I try to do everything right.  I try to educate myself more.  I try different approaches with everything.  I know the definition of insanity is doing the same things expecting different results.  So now I'm begging for help.  Any help.  How do we change this?  How can the middle class get some help?  How can we really lower living expenses?  Will my family ever get a break?  How can I improve my credit score if I can't afford to pay our normal monthly expenses, let alone our student loans, and medical debt?