My son was born in September of 2004, and then was hospitalized in October 2004 for 2.5 weeks with a severe case of RSV. I wouldn't be able to re-open my preschool until at least January 2005. The doctor also didn't want my son to go to daycare, if at all possible, until he was a year to lower his exposure. So I concentrated on graduating with my masters. I took a full load in the fall of 2004 (yep, I was 8 months pregnant when the sememester started, and only took a week off when he was born. And only a few days when he was hospitalized; thankfully I had mostly evening classes, so I could spend my days there and my husband could spend his evenings there) and a full load in Spring 2005. I no longer had any tuition help since I was laid off, so we had to find a way to pay for school, and now I was taking a full load. To cover my school expenses, we increased the amount of student loans that we took out for that school year. But it would be o.k. I'd get a job that next fall. We would start paying back on the loans right away.
Oh, did I mention that I had to have extensive dental work done in the fall of 2004? 6 of my top front teeth would either need to be pulled or I'd need to have root canals and crowns to replace them. I knew that it would be much cheaper to just have them pulled, but as a (then) 38 year old woman, I wasn't quite ready to go without front teeth. Dentures weren't really a possibility. If I wanted to be able to have front teeth, I'd need to have 6 root canals and crowns on my front teeth (oh, I also had two lower molars that needed to be done at the same time. Molars, but the ones you can see when you smile, of course. Not far back molars.) We couldn't afford health insurance through my husband's plan, but we could afford and get dental insurance through his plan. But unfortunately, there was a cap of $2000 per calendar year/per person on dental work. (Very typical for dental insurance to have a similar cap.) The bill for this work - $9000. If we put it on a four year payment plan, $12,500. So we signed up for the payment plan.
That spring (2005), my graduate director asked me to stay in school for another year, so I could do a graduate assistantship in project management in the fall 2005/spring 2006. I'd get a decent stipend, I'd only have to work afternoons, and I'd get some good work experience. I'd get student health insurance. So I did it.
Things were going o.k. I kept teaching preschool in the mornings, I had the assistantship in the afternoons. My oldest was in Kindergarten, my middle was in pre-K, and my youngest, who was now a year, just had to go to daycare in the afternoons. I had health insurance through school. The kids were on Medicaid, but we were no longer using WIC. My husband was on his own plan. So things weren't great, but they weren't awful. We'd got a new to us mini-van in the fall of 2005 (it was 2005 model, but it was slightly used) and got rid of our other car and went down to one car. I graduated with my masters in the fall of 2006, and planned on getting another job.
Of course, I was pregnant again by this point too. I had found out I was pregnant in June 2006. It was unplanned. I was almost 40. We were struggling. And this was going to impact, at least somewhat, on a getting a job. But I figured I'd cross that bridge when I got to it. And then in September, I miscarried. I applied for lots of jobs that fall and winter. I got no full-time offers. I took a part-time evening job (that had NOTHING to do with training or project management, and paid just over minimum wage, but they were the only ones to offer anything) in October 2006. So now I was teaching preschool in the morning and working in the evenings. I had no health and dental benefits and just hoped for the best. The kids stayed on Medicaid. My husband stayed on his plan.
The next fall (of 2007), I stopped the part-time evening work because it was so hard on my family, and it was for very little money. (Don't forget too, we still only had one car!) But, in addition to teaching preschool, I started watching one of the preschoolers all day, and this made up for the pay that I lost in the evening job.
And also in the fall of 2007, we finally decided that we HAD to do something about our credit card debt situation. By this point, it was completely out of control. We had close to $20,000 in credit card debt by this point, and we had only been managing to pay the minimum for years now. At this rate, we wouldn't pay it off in our lifetime. We had considered selling our house and renting, but a) we would need to get a 2, or more likely, 3 bedroom apartment, and of course, by now, the housing market had crashed. We would likely lose money in a house sale. We were cramped in the house, especially the kitchen, we didn't have money to make any updates, but we WERE making our mortgage payment every month. So we met with some from our local not for profit Credit Counseling Center, and made a 4 year payment plan to pay off our credit card debt. It would require us to pay them $500 a month and they would negotiate lower interest rates and the CCC office would pay the credit cards directly. It would require us to close our accounts and not open any more credit lines until we were completely out of credit card debt. It was scary to do all that, but I couldn't face thinking about never getting out of debt either. So we did it. We had a plan, at least, now. We would be out of credit card debt by June 2011. We also (re)committed to saving up for any future purchases that were larger than $100. And purchases that were more than $25 had to be discussed with the other spouse and put in the budget before you could purchase it.
In November 2007, I found I was pregnant with our son, Chistopher. It was a pregnancy full of complications, and by February, I had to stop doing preschool and daycare, with the plan to start up again when I got to a better place with the pregnancy. (Thankfully, my sister took over for me with the daycare child.) Sadly, our son was stillborn in late March 2008. I started doing daycare again by May, and started preschool again that fall. Also, over the summer, I added a second daycare child, and a third in the fall. By this point, I made too much to qualify for the Medicaid, and I was now making enough to pay for my own health insurance though a private company. For now, the children would continue to be covered through Medicaid. My husband would stay on his plan.
But of course, getting private, individual health insurance wasn't easy. Or cheap. Because I had used fertility treatments in the past (even though, by this point, I was using an IUD to prevent any further pregnancies), I did not qualify for a plan that had a low deductible & low payment. But I was finally able to get individual health insurance. Such as it was, anyway. I had a $4,000 deductible. I paid almost $300 a month for just an individual policy. If I got sick, it wasn't like we had money to cover a large (up to $4000) out of pocket expense. Just paying the premium was hard enough. So basically, I paid the premiums every month, but couldn't afford to actually go to the doctor or the hospital. I just carried it unless something catastrophic happened.
I'd been frugal all along, but starting in 2007, I started trying to be more self-reliant too. I started gardening, canning, sewing, making cheese, etc. Anything to help us have to spend less money and be more self-sufficient, at least any way we could.
Also, since I graduated in Spring 2006, I had still been looking for full-time work in Technical Writing and/or Training. I sent out numerous resumes. I registered with Monster and other on-line job sites. I networked. I'd go on interviews occassionally, but often, I'd hear nothing. And I never, ever got a full-time job offer. We knew that I would probably be able to get a job if we moved, but we couldn't afford to move. My student loans were (acutally still are) in either deferrment or forbearance. So I didn't have that expense, but it isn't like it was magically going to go away. I was so frustrated that I had even taken the loans. That I'd even gone back to school at all. Of course, I never dreamed that it was going to be so difficult to get a job. And of course, by 2008, the recession had begun in full-force.
2008 was a very hard year - I was on bedrest for much of the first 3 months of 2008 due to my pregnancy and unable to work, then we lost our son at the end of March. I did have 3 daycare children by the end of 2008, but it mostly just meant that I was working more than 40 hours a day for not very good money. I mean, I was grateful. I was making money. There were others who couldn't seem to get a job at all. But it certainly hadn't been in the plan for me to be working full time doing daycare.
By January of 2009, - between our credit card payment, food, utilities, and mortgage - we could no longer afford to pay for my private health insurance. When it got down to choosing between our house and food or paying for health insurance with such a high deductible that I couldn't afford to actually use it, we chose our house and food. So I stopped paying my health care premimums and we just hoped for the best. I had no other options. We made too much for me to qualify for the state program. The kids were STILL on Medicaid, but we had moved up to a higher level and we paid $80 a month for the kids to be covered. My husband was still on his plan.
It wasn't all bad. Somewhere this year, we FINALLY managed to pay off the $12K dental bill from 2004. By the fall of 2009, I was doing mostly daycare. I had only one preschool only child. I had 5 daycare children, and the children coming for daycare were primarily preschool age, and so I would teach them in the morning, and then they would stay on through the afternoon.
In the fall of 2009, we were also homeschooling - actually in our second year. My oldest was in 4th grade, and my middle was in 2nd, (youngest was 4). We were homeschooling for multiple reasons, and we did plan on the children going back to public school at some point, but for now, I also needed to be available during the day for homeschooling. My sister was homeschooling her children too, and she would come over to my house, and we worked out a schedule for homeschooling and teaching preschool/daycare for all of the children. It was hectic, to say the least.
I also paid my sister for helping me, and so while I was techically making more than I ever had because I was providing daycare for 5 children, I also had to pay my sister. So we really weren't that much further ahead. But we did manage to pay off the van in 2009, and that helped some. We also were given a car for free in 2009 (long story, but it was a 2002 sedan with low miles.)
So by now, it was almost 2010. I had no health insurance, but I did have dental insurance through my husband's plan. We were paying $80 a month for the three children to have health insurance through Medicaid, and they had dental insurance through my husband's plan. My husband had insurance through his work (he had to pay no premiums for just him to be covered; it was when he added anyone that it got VERY expensive) and so he had health and dental insurance. He had a pension plan through his work. I still had nothing for retirement - I'd cashed out any retiremement funds I had years ago, and we had never made enough for us be able to start adding to an IRA or something. Since I'd been laid off in 2004, I'd never had a full-time job with benefits. But we were making lots of progress on our credit card debt. We'd paid off that dental bill. We'd paid off the van and had a second car (that we got for free) for the first time in a long time. We were paying our mortgage(s). We paid our utilities. We had enough to buy food. As long as we were really frugal with our money, we were doing o.k.
