Finally, in January 2010, there was some good (especially financial!) news. My husband, after 10 years at the fire department, had applied for a different job and got it! In his new job, he would be doing more media relations, there was room for advancement, it would give him more business experience, AND they had a reasonable health/prescription and dental plan for families. We could also put up to $2500 a year to put in a health/dental spending account. He would have a traditional 401k plan instead of a pension. He would be making better money than he had at the fire department. For the first time in 6 plus years, we would ALL be on the same health care plan. We felt so blessed, that in the middle of this recession, we were able to be finally on our feet again.
Fall of 2010 comes around and my sister and her family moves out of state. My oldest goes back to public school. Youngest goes to Kindergarten. Middle child is still being homeschooled. Some of my daycare students left for kindergarten, but I got a couple new children too. I did daycare for 4 children and homeschooled one. But since my husband's job provided more money, and better benefits, even though I was home and doing less daycare than I had in a few years, we were doing ok. Fine, in fact. We had paid off our car. I was hitting my stride with my self-reliant/self-reliant living. We only had one more year until we were out of credit card debt. We were paying all of our bills. We were living within our means. We even had some money in a savings account!
January 2011. My husband enjoys the duties of his new job, but he is starting to have some issues at work. It seems that what his boss believes the job to be and what my husband things it is don't match up. She mentions a few things in his yearly performance review. He begins looking for a different job, but he also starts to try and do the things that she expects out of the job. It is challenging, because the expectations are vague, but he does his best. He goes to work early and stays late. In addition, it appears that everyone else that he works with on all of his projects, is MORE than pleased with his work and he has a hard time really figuring out how to do his job so that his boss feels that he is doing the job that she wants him to do. He has another review in March and it still isn't a great review. My husband attempts to get more clarification, but much of it was still coming down to personal and very vague expectations from his boss. My husband continues to look for work, but also continues to try and complete his job duties in a way that his boss expects.
And on June 2, 2011, he was fired.
He spent a month or so trying to figure out what to do next. And then, a friend needed almost the whole interior of his house painted. He asked my husband if he had any painting experience? My husband said, Yes, I've done some over the years, some at home, some for other friends and family, etc. So he did that job. And then another friend asked about a few rooms in his house. And another friend asked for a few rooms. By this time, my husband knew that he found this time of work much more relaxing than anything he had ever done before, but he wasn't sure if he wanted to stop looking for a full-time "regular" job too.
Oh, that payment to the Credit Counseling Center? The $500 a month we were paying towards getting out of credit card debt? THANKFULLY, we made our last payment in June of 2011. I don't know what we would have done if a) we hadn't done it in the first place, and still had that mountain of credit card debt when this happened and b) if we had had to find a way to come up with that payment AND deal with how we were going to survive without his income.
OH, and because I'm the queen of dental problems, in March of 2011, I broke off one of my top front teeth. No big deal, right? It was one of the teeth with a crown, so just put the crown back on, right? Um, of course it couldn't be that easy. I broke it off at the gum, and so you couldn't just put the crown back on because there was nothing to put the crown back onto. I had 3 options this time a) extraction, partial denture, or an implant/abuttment/crown. I was strongly advised to go with the dental implant because of the location and my age. Had I known that he would actually get fired, I would have gone with extraction or partial denture, but I didn't. If I'd known that it was actually going to cost almost $5000 when it was all done, I would have gone with extraction or partial denture, but I didn't. I went with the implant.
I had the dental implant surgically attached in March 2011 and we were able to use most of the $2500 from our health savings account to cover the surgery. I had to wait a few months for my mouth to heal until we could put the crown on. I was given a temporary denture to wear until then, but it wasn't made to be worn for longer than a few months. We had been given an estimate by the dentist for what I THOUGHT was for the crown, and so we started saving for the crown in April of 2011. The job loss, of course, made it harder to save up any money, but we had saved the $1200 by September of 2011 to get it done.
Or so we thought. Apparently, the amount we saved was just for the abuttment, which is used to attach the crown to. The crown itself was another $1200. Since by September of 2011, we had no dental insurance at all, we had to pay full price for everything. (Normally, if you go through a dental insurance company, they will negotiate discounts, etc.) When they told me it would be another $1200 on top of the $1200 that we had worked so hard to save, I actually cried in the office. I had no idea how we would get another $1200 saved up. I had no job leads. My husband had done 3 paint jobs, but otherwise, hadn't made any other money. I was just making a little bit of money for daycare. At this point, I had the implant, but I couldn't wear the temporary denture much longer. I couldn't do a permanent denture without more surgery and more expense. I didn't know what to do. They offered to let me pay $100 a month and they'd do the abuttment and the crown at the same time. I took their offer, even though I had no idea how I would come up with that $100 every month. I didn't even know how we were going to get our mortgage paid every month.
My husband applied for, and by July 2011, began receiving unemployment benefits. Should he have done this? Well, he had been paying into the system all of these years, and never used it. He was approed for it. If he didn't take the money from unemployment, and if he wasn't able to get a full-time job soon, we would lose our house in a BIG hurry. If he hadn't taken it , my daycare money would MAYBE pay for food and MAYBE pay for gas for the cars and maybe a couple of utilities. (of course, with no house, we wouldn't need to pay for utilities!) So we opted to do take unemployment.
And then, the unemployment office recommended that he apply for food stamps. Surely, we didn't need that too? Surely, we could make it on our own. But this was before he got the paint jobs. This was before he had heard if he was even going to get unemployment. I was terrified that, after 3-4 weeks of living off our food we had stored at home, that we would run out of food. I was afraid to spend my daycare money on food because I didn't know what would happen if someone got sick or if a car broke down. So we decided to take it. And they approved us - $600 a month for food (with restrictions. Just food products. No paper products. No soap. No alcohol. No non-human food, etc.) It would just be for a few months. Just until we figured out what we were going to do.
In just a year and half, we had gone from paying all of our bills, having private health/dental coverage, and even having money in a savings account
to
living on Medicaid, unemployment, and food stamps.
