There, now that you’re caught up, you know that my wife quit her job about a year ago.  Sometime around last August, she and two of her friends (and ex-coworkers) decided to start a business together.  And as of the last update, you knew that the business was going well.

Now, the business is still doing well.  Better than most of us expected, I think.  On May 1st, they began working with the clients that the certification that they picked up allowed them to.  Because of that, all three of them should be seeing full time hours fairly soon.  My wife has been working full time and then some for several months, but everyone else has been relegated to doing most of the office work (that is unpaid).  That’s good for us, but wasn’t all that great for everyone else, or for business partner morale.  Unfortunately, much of what my wife does is limited to people with certain qualifications.  Qualifications that only my wife has.  And, until the business is able to help pay for the others to get those qualifications, she’s got to do it.  With the new program that they just started, that should become more of a possibility towards the end of the year.  Of course, if the new program continues to do well, it might not be something that needs doing anyways.

As I expected, due to the added insurance costs, and some increases in withholding for ChildCare, my checks are much smaller than they were in 2009.  We had planned on that, and since a lot of the extra is pre-tax, it will help us in the long run.  It is a bit sad to see your net income be less than 50% of your gross income though.  To try and compensate, I’ve re-doubled my efforts here and at my other websites to try and make up some of the difference.  Income is increasing there, but it’s a very slow process, and it has yet to be enough to make any significant difference anywhere.

Due to my wife’s increased work load, we’ve been able to keep up with our bills and haven’t had any major issues.  It hasn’t been good enough for us to return to aggressive debt payments, but we haven’t added much new debt either.  That’s a win if you ask me.

The rest of the year looks pretty good.  My wife’s business looks like it will continue to grow and, with any luck, so will my side endeavors.  I’m hoping that we might even be able to start our debt snowball rolling again.

My Wife Quit Her Job: One Year Later is a post from: Beating Broke, if you enjoy it, please visit us and subscribe to the Feed.

Now, before I go on to tell you what it is we are doing with that money, I need to say something.  For the last several years, we have spent nearly every spare dime we have on paying off debt.  We still have debt that needs to be paid off.  However.  Despite my hate for debt, I’ve come to realize that you cannot let other things slide in order to pay off that debt.  With that in mind, here’s how we’re spending our refund.

We’re getting a new kitchen.  The cupboards in our kitchen are original to the house (circa 1950) and have been painted so many times that they no longer close.  The drawers grind against their frame and the resulting paint dust and wood dust falls down from them onto anything in the cupboards below them.  We have to wash our pans before we can use them because of the dust.  The linoleum on the floor is peeling up.  The carpet is ancient, smelly, and stained.  If you took just the kitchen from our house, it would fit right in with many of the run down slum rentals in town.  We want to move up to a newer (read bigger) house soon, so we need to make this house sellable.  In my opinion, with the kitchen in this condition, it would not sell for what it is worth.  So, we went and bought all new cupboards, countertop, and flooring. Oh, and a dishwasher.  That’s a certifiable luxury, but it helps that we bought it all on sale.  All of the supplies came in at about $2300.  There’s still a few odds and ends that we’ll need to purchase, but we should be able to keep it at about $2700 or less.

This weekend, my father is coming to town to help me install it all.  With any luck, come Monday, it will be mostly finished and usable.

If the plan works, we’ll still have about $800 or so left over.  And with that, we’re buying a couch.  And maybe a loveseat.  Depends on the sale I suppose.   This could be classified as a luxury that we don’t need if it weren’t for the hole in the one cushion, the rips in the spring lining that allows everything to fall between the cushions and disappear into the couch, and the stitching that is coming out at all the seams.  The couches that we are replacing are in dire need of it.  We got them free and have used them for several years.  The couches we had before that were hand me downs and garage sale finds.  It’s time for something new.  And, yes, we could go to garage sales and find new used stuff, but we’ve been saying that for at least a year and haven’t done it, so we’re going to splurge a bit.

When we’re done with all of that, we’ll go back to trying to pay everything off.  My wife’s new business is growing well (that’s another post), and her income is leveling off some, so we can more properly budget for debt repayment.  We’re leaps and bounds from where we were when we got married, and with any luck, 2011 will be the last year we spend with any real debt aside from a mortgage.

What are you doing with your refund?

Tax Day: What We’re Doing With Our Refund is a post from: Beating Broke, if you enjoy it, please visit us and subscribe to the Feed.

The business that my wife and her friends started continues to do well.  They received a very important certification from the state that will allow them to pick up another line of business and expand even further.  My wife continues to be the only one getting a regular paycheck from the company, but with this new certification, that will likely change very soon.  Luckily, the people that she’s working with are both very qualified for the business that they are in and have plenty of experience (my wife does to) so they don’t have much in the way of learning curves for the actual service that they provide.  Their biggest learning curve has been the actual running of the business.  They were smart and got a lawyer and an accountant right away though, so they’ve had excellent guidance along the way.

Also, I did receive a small raise this year which should help.  However, between the insurance and some increases in medical flex and childcare flex, my checks will likely be smaller than they were in 2009.  Most of that should come back through the flex accounts.  Tax free money for the win.  Especially on things like childcare that you’re going to spend money on anyways!

My Wife Quit Her Job: End of Year Update is a post from: Beating Broke, if you enjoy it, please visit us and subscribe to the Feed.

Since my wife quit her job, we’ve been paying for Cobra health insurance to continue with the coverage that we had.  It was a bit of an increase since you pay for the company portion as well as what you would have normally paid, but we had already met our deductible and it pays 100% after that.  That full coverage bit helped us justify the extra couple of hundred that we had to pay each month.  But earlier this week, we got a letter from my wife’s former employer that informed us that the cost of the insurance would be going up and that beginning on the 1st of September we would have to pay that.

I probably don’t have to tell you that the increase puts an even deeper kink in our financial situation.  We may have to lose the 100% coverage in exchange for the plan that I get from work.  It’s only marginally cheaper than the original Cobra price, but even more so now that we’ve been hit with this increase.  The only part I haven’t worked out is if we would be better off keeping the Cobra coverage until the end of the year.  Any new deductible that we might have to meet may offset any extra premiums that we would have to pay.  Decisions, Decisions.

On a brighter note, the business that my wife and her friends started is still doing well.  She’s even expecting to get her first paycheck from the new company this month!  Certainly not a full paycheck, but getting closer.

My Wife Quit Her Job: The Hits Keep On Rolling is a post from: Beating Broke, if you enjoy it, please visit us and subscribe to the Feed.

The decision came much easier for her than it did for me.  I didn’t have to work there, so I didn’t have the same problems as she did.  But, most of all, my trepidation came from the fact that my salary alone could not support us.  We would need to find a new source of income, and quickly.

Decisions made, my wife sent her resignation letter to her employer.  And then they sent back a bill.  You see, my wife was on maternity leave which is covered under the Family Medical Leave Act.  In that law, there is a section that states that if the employee does not return from the FMLA leave, the employer can reclaim any expenses such as health insurance that they incurred while the employee was on leave.  It was not a small bill.  If I recall (who am I kidding.  I remember.) it was just over $1200.00.  As you can imagine, we were both devastated.  Not only were we jumping directly out of the pan and into the fire, but now they had turned up the flame.  We could pay it out of savings, but it would put a very serious dent in it.  And that was money that we were counting on to keep our bills paid until my wife started earning money again.

You’ll have to excuse me a bit, while I digress.  I want to explain how we planned on getting my wife making money again.  We have, for several years, been active sellers on eBay.  Never anything on any grand scale.  We’d hit a garage sale here, and an estate sale or auction there and see what kind of easter eggs we could find.  Having had that already in gear, we decided that ramping it up would be the easiest (and fastest) way to get some income coming back in.  So, we began the search for more product and more suppliers for the product.  End digression.  I think I’ll leave any other details of that operation to another post.

So, being the natural arguer that I am, I started doing a little bit of research on FMLA law.  I’m no lawyer, so basically all I did was confuse myself further.  My brother, on the other hand, is a lawyer.  Well, he will be sometime around May of next year.  But, he happens to be working at a law firm and has access to all the lawyers and their resources.  So, I asked him to look into it a little.  A few text messages back and forth.  An email or two. And a letter later.  The bill went away.  Turns out, that by requiring my wife to take all of her remaining sick/vacation time as well as using her short term disability insurance (both of which were enough time to cover the entire 12 weeks), they managed to make it so that they couldn’t reclaim that money.  Sucks for them.  Turns out very well for us.  Thank you brother.  And thank you law firm that he works for, for the pro bono work on the letter.

After that was taken care of, we could really concentrate on ramping up the eBay stuff.  We spent several weeks working out and implementing a way to grow the business.  As it turns out, it grew a little bit slower than we had anticipated.  And it certainly wasn’t going to make enough money to cover our expenses.  At least, not right away.  It might in the future.  I, being the one that constantly worries (read stresses) about our finances, was beginning to think that it was about time for my wife to start looking for a part time job, if not a full time one.  Little did I know the hidden paths that God reveals to us.

I told you before that the company that my wife worked for before wasn’t the greatest place to work.  Truth is, it started out as a really nice place to work.  Somewhere in between, it went very downhill.  My wife’s best friend got fired, my Wife got passed over for promotions that she had been promised.  And overall, everyone was fed up with the place.  So, another of their ex-coworkers, who is also a friend, approached them with an offer.  They would start their own company, doing the exact same thing as their previous employer.  They all three loved what they were doing, just not the company, so it made a lot of sense.

That was about three months ago.  They have since formed a corporation, gotten all their paperwork and such in order and opened for business on the 1st of August.  So far, things are going very well.  They’ve had more business than they had anticipated and things seem to be growing well.  We’re all hopeful that it will continue to blossom and grow.  Maybe one day, I’ll get to be strictly self-employed.

Of course, some of you will remember that I told you earlier that this wasn’t a story of financial bliss.  It may become one, but it isn’t yet.  We are still struggling to make our financial ends meet and likely will until at least the end of the year.  My wife gets paid for the time she works at the company and will likely get a little bit of a shareholder bonus at the end of the year as well.  And hopefully, they’ll be able to add a few new products to their line by then as well.  Until then, however, we’re learning how to flex our frugal muscles and save as much as possible so that we can pay our bills.

My Wife Quit Her Job is a post from: Beating Broke, if you enjoy it, please visit us and subscribe to the Feed.

In any case, despite the rampant fiscal spending of the trip, I thought I might pass along a few of the personal finance books that I’ve found usefull in our married life.  That is a pretty short list, but a distinguished one.  Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover, Is top of the list. I might throw inThe Millionaire Next Door as well. But those are about the limit of the books that both my wife and I found to be useful. I’ve read a few others that were somewhat informative to me, but I’m trying to find books that are specific to couples.

A quick search of Amazon finds a few others like one by David Bach called Smart Couples Finish Rich: 9 Steps to Creating a Rich Future for You and Your Partner, and Larry Burkett’s Complete Financial Guide for Young Couples: A Lifetime Approach to Spending, Saving and Investing. I’ve never read either, so don’t know if they are worth the time or not.  That’s where you all come in.

Do you and your partner have a book that was important to your finances?  Something that made the transition to couples money management a little bit easier?  Let us all know in the comments.  I’ll try and get a list together and share it all with everyone a little later this month.

Good PF Books for Wedding Gifts? is a post from: Beating Broke, if you enjoy it, please visit us and subscribe to the Feed.