Pinball

If you can avoid having a sudden loss of income I highly recommend it. The husbeast has been employed since the beginning of February, and we are still feeling the strain of his three months of joblessness. I am not certain if we really got that far behind or if it is just the extra financial strain of doing faire, but it seems like our bank account is always just on the verge of being overdrawn.

I have always been in charge of paying bills in our home. If I let the husbeast do it, nothing would ever get paid. I discovered this while we were still in college and still maintaining separate apartments. The number of times the electricity and water were shut off at the boys house was just silly. It was sort of a no brainer for me to handle the finances once we merged households.

Still even after paying all the bills for so long I am not always very good at it. I have this really bad habit of paying things too early and then running out of money because of it. The bills get paid but sometimes the grocery budget suddenly gets very tight. I like to think though that I am getting better at it.

Over the last few months though, no matter how creative I got with bill paying there never seemed to be enough. I had trimmed the fat from the budget and was still looking at giant holes that meant something wasn't going to get paid. When we were in college it was always choosing between water or electricity, now it is choosing between being late on the mortgage or a car payment.

Thankfully though every time I was certain we were going to end up having a utility shut off or to live off of Ramen for a few weeks, we have received a financial boon from absolutely no where. There was a random escrow overage check from one of our mortgage companies, there was a random gift of money from my parents, and most recently a refund of maintenance fees on a checking account.

The money is never enough to put us ahead of the curve but it is enough to allow us to breath for another two weeks until we get paid again. Even if I think it is going to be that little bump to get us just ahead it turns out to be the miracle money that will pay off the speeding ticket that was forgotten about, or the portion of our taxes we had to pay right now, or to replace a tire that got impaled.

It really sort of makes me feel like I am in some sort of financial pinball machine. I am getting batted about like crazy, but I haven't lost yet. It is insane, and more than just a little stressful. This month should see the start of commission checks though, and then after next month we won't have the added expense of faire so that should help put us ahead a little as well.

We are also waiting on the unemployment insurance* to be activated on a few of our credit cards which should knock out the balance on those, and hopefully get us a reimbursement of everything paid to them since the insurance should have kicked in. If so that will be a nice little chunk of cash coming back our way. It will only go to paying something else off, but I will take every penny I get.

In the meantime all I can do is just hold on and hope I don't make anymore mistakes. I am really ready for this particular ride to be over.


* Seriously the biggest pain in the ass ever. They have 'not received' our paper work twice and then randomly asked for extra paper work that they really should have requested up front. Honestly the extra paperwork seems pointless since they already have the unemployment paperwork, I don't see why they need a letter from his previous employer as well. If I had known it was going to be this hard I wouldn't have taken out the insurance in the first place.