Hey all! Mind if I join you? We've been struggling for a long, long time now and I'd love to have someplace to come and talk about it. We don't chat about it with family or friends, really, and we avoid talking about it with each other unless we need to discuss something. DH is very sensitive about the whole thing as he's the only one who works. I stay home with our three kids, the younger two are only 1 and 2 years old so we are saving money with me staying home. Any childcare costs would completely offset any income I'd bring in. I've looked into it.
But, here we are the end of another year and further behind that last year. I'm baffled as to how things seems like they should be getting better, but don't. DH has gotten a new and supposedly better job every year for the past 3 years. Our spending habits have gotten sooo much better. We have some government assistance now. We have not added any new bills-in fact we paid off a student loan in the past year. And we are worse off now than ever before. It seems so backwards-we have not been as well since DH went to college. We were better off monetarily before all these blasted student loans and DH and I fell for the school's marketing gimmick. He went to culinary school and works as a chef. The school told us to expect a good $10000 a yr more than what is actually paid out in the real world. *sigh* Doesn't help that DH graduated six months after the housing bubble collapsed and as the recession really started to kick in. One of the first things people stop doing is going out to eat when they trim their budget. Bad time to be a budding chef.
Anyway, now here we are a month behind on all our bills and really thankful we rent from my FIL. We have until the end of March to get back on schedule with our rent. This is the first month we've ever not been able to pay rent. Our food stamps were up for reevaluation at the end of November. We are still eligable but the paperwork wasn't pushed through before December because of Thanksgiving. So we've had to go the month without food stamps. We'll get double when January's payment comes through, which is thankfully only a few days away now, but until then...Oh and DH had an unpaid week off in November for Thanksgiving (not by his choice) and another unpaid week off this month.
We are trying our best to hold out until tax time. Just another six weeks or so of trying to wade through it before we get our tax return. And DH works for the company who has the food contract with Lucas Oil Stadium where the Super Bowl will be this year. So he'll be at work for about ten days straight (between the hrs he will work and heightened security around the city, he won't be coming home) but holy monkeys will that be a nice check!
So yeah, that's me and my pent up rant!
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