Sunday, December 11, 2011

High highs and low lows

What a couple of weeks.   As you can tell from the title it's been a real roller coaster ride.   First I'll start with the highs.   I wasn't going to post this until the end of the month, but considering the second part of this post, I'll share my good news.    For 2010, we made a good effort to pay down some debt.   Unfortunately when we got to the end of 2010, I had no idea how much we had paid off.   I would have had to dig through a lot of paperwork to figure out what all of our debts were at the beginning of 2010.   Additionally, we acquired new debt in 2010 after purchasing a car, so it definitely off-set the balance.   Near the end of 2010 is when we really headed in the direction of me quitting in 2011 so the journey got really serious.   Last December I took a tally of ALL of our debt.  It was BIG.   But now, I fortunately can see the progress we've been making.  

I was really excited about determining where we ended up this year, so I couldn't wait until the end of the month.   So here's the bottom line... From 12/28 last year, to early December this year, we paid off over $15K on debts.   That's principal balance!!!   I'm ecstatic!   Who knew?  Granted, now that I've quit, we anticipate that the pace will slow down considerably and we still have years ahead of us to get completely out of debt.   But I felt pretty good about the progress we made this year.   Just goes to show what we can do when we put our mind to it.... and have God's blessing of course!!!

So onto the lows...  I guess I'll just get right to the point.   Well maybe not... my husband has been working at a local computer shop for about 15 months.    Business has been slow.   My husband's old boss decided to sell the business to one of the employees.   Ownership changed Oct. 1 of this year.   Because business was slow, my husband's schedule had been part time to full time and then back to part time.   He is currently working 2 days a week.   Because he was only working 2 days a week, he's been picking up tons of construction work. 

Side story... since the construction has been picking up.   My husband has considered going full bore into business.   We've been praying about what to do.   My husband went on a hunting trip recently and had lots of time to pray and seek the Lord sitting in a tree.   He told me he didn't feel like he was supposed to stay in computers.    This is a little crazy for me, because about a year and a half ago we had a discussion about where to go and decided computers was probably a good avenue.   So here we are having a similar conversation again and going in a completely different direction.  I truly left it in the Lord's hands.   My husband is the head of our house and I want to follow his leading, but I also needed to know from God which way to go. 

So to the point... my husband got let go from the computer shop.   The new owner recognized that only being there 2 days a week, this job was not as important to my husband as it was before.   He also recognized that he could not pay my husband in the salary range we need to support our family to bring him back full time.   So of course I'm bummed to lose the income from this job... especially since it was guaranteed income compared to the ups and downs of construction work.
So that's my story.   Always a new adventure.   It's going to be an exciting ride.  

No comments: