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.

Let me tell you a little secret.  We’ve all been there.  In all likelihood, we’ll all be there again.  But, some of us will get back up, dust ourselves off, and get back to doing what it was we were doing in the first place.  The rest will sit on the ground where they landed, beaten and broken, and never get back up.  They’ve given up.  The world got the best of them, and they have lost the will to try again.

Getting back up isn’t the hard part.  Gathering the will to get back up is.

None of us who have fallen and gotten back up have any greater aptitude for it than anyone else.  Sure, we may be better at some things than other people, but when we fail, we are all the same.  Here’s a little bit more of a secret.  Some of us are better prepared for the fall.   We’ve done what we can to soften the blow, not because it’s inevitable, but because it could happen.  Think of it this way; you don’t buy health insurance because your sick, (well most don’t) you buy it in case you get sick.  You don’t wear a helmet while bicycling because you know you’re going to fall, you wear it in case you do fall.  Sometimes situations are out of our control.  We certainly don’t choose to get sick.  And we don’t choose to fall off of our bikes on to the hard concrete below.  But, sometimes it happens.  And the better prepared you are for it, the easier it is to get back up and get going.

An example.

Many years ago (something like 7), I drove a old pickup (older than I am).  One particularly cold day, then engine refused to start.  It refused to start the next day despite having a charger on it and attempts to pull start it.  I couldn’t go without a car, so what was I to do?  I had no savings, and no means of coming up with any extra money.  I had fallen.  In order to get myself up and out of the hole I had dug, I was forced to take on a massive (for me at the time) car loan on a used car.  The bank wouldn’t finance much without a down payment, so I took what I could get.  It was a terribly low spot for me, financially.  I went from having no car payment at all, to having a car payment of a little under $200 a month.  I could afford it, but just barely.  If anything had happened to my income or if an emergency of some sort had arisen, I would have fallen that much farther (and harder).  To be honest, I didn’t learn all that much from that particular episode.  But, I did get back up and back on the road.

A week or so ago, my car sprung an oil leak.  The repair wasn’t horribly expensive (only about $150), but enough that it could have been very damaging if I had been in the same situation as I was before.  But, I’m not.  I’m prepared.  I have a small emergency fund that can easily cover an expense of that magnitude.  The fall wasn’t nearly as bad.  It wasn’t as bad of a situation as it was before, either.  But, because I had prepared, the fall was very short and I was able to recover quickly.  In fact, it was less of a fall than it was just a little bump.

Preparing for an emergency isn’t a bad thing.  It doesn’t mean that you are expecting to have an emergency any more than having health insurance means you’re expecting to get sick, or wearing a bike helmet means you’re expecting to fall.  But it cushions you against the fall.  Getting sick is less stressful if you have insurance that you know will pick up part of the bill.  You’ll have less road rash if you’re wearing a helmet.  And, if you have an emergency fund, more falls will become bumps.

Do yourself the favor.  Prepare now, so that when you do fall, you’ve got some cushioning to land on.

Picking Yourself Back Up Again 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.

And here’s why.  Actually, the laundry list of reasons is a bit too long for me to go into detail, but let me discuss the most recent issue that is prompting this post.

I owe them money.  All told, it’s around $1300 that I owe them.  Not a big deal, and manageable.  Unless your Innovis.  Beginning in November of last year, I’ve had a budgeted agreement with them to pay them $45 a month.  I set it up on my bill pay to make sure that I won’t miss a payment and all is well and good, right?  Wrong.

Today, I got a phone call from their business department (read bill department) requesting a call back.  I called back and got a rep.  What she explained to me is that the policy of Innovis is to get at least 10% of the outstanding bill as a payment.  Fine, I told her, but I can’t pay that.  We only have so much money in the month and $45 is what we can afford to send to them.  I was then informed that unless they get the 10%, there is no way for them to guarantee that my bill will not get reviewed for collections.  What?!?

In a nutshell, they would rather sell my account to a collection agency and get 50% (or whatever an agency pays for debt) of the money they are owed instead of carrying the bill and receive all of it $45 at a time?  What kind of hair brained idea is that?  By being a good consumer and paying my bill on time and consistently, they are going to irreparably damage my credit report?  Some reward for doing the right thing.

I have half a mind to ask them to send it to collections now so I can begin negotiations with the collection agency to reduce the bill.  Unfortunately, I don’t know if that would affect my families ability to receive medical care there.  Not a big deal for me, I switched to a different medical facility a while ago, but Innovis has the only Pediatrician in town.

Innovis is the worst health facility I’ve ever dealt with.

And thanks for reading my rant.  I know I feel better.

Innovis Health Stinks 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.

That light, courtesy of a book called Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey, may have saved our financial lives.  Maybe we would have continued to barely make it, but we would have never made it to where we are now.  It’s been a little over a year since we started our makeover and we’ve seen some pretty amazing results so far.

When we started the plan, we were struggling financially.  Our debt to income ratio was well over 40% and the best we could do was to pay the minimum on everything and hope that there was still money in the bank when the checks came through.  All told, we had debt of over $100,000 and total income of less than $50,000.  We may have been on the verge of bankruptcy.  Our net worth was a horrible -$85000.  But we turned it around.

We started with a budget and built up a $1000 emergency fund.  We still have that $1000 in the bank earning interest at etrade.  We still use a budget every month.  We’ve paid off one of our cars, several credit cards and have moved a couple credit cards to 0% intro rates.  We’re nowhere near being out of the fire yet, but we are getting there.  Our one year review shows a net worth of -$58000.  An impressive increase.  It was helped by a nearly $10,000 increase in the value of our home, but still reflects the work we’ve put into our finances.

We’re on our way to financial independence and a debt free lifestyle.

Where We Began is a post from: Beating Broke, if you enjoy it, please visit us and subscribe to the Feed.