one income

Can’t I Be a Little Bitter?

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

Bitter, me? You’re forgetting that I went through this last year. YOU didn’t. Can’t I be a little bitter? Can’t I complain just a bit, please? Do YOU have your entire family dependent on YOUR salary? Can you afford to lose $300 in a month, times three? Because I can barely pay my bills with what money I make. And even if I do have my job again next year, I will have to go through all of this again. But if I get moved to another school, which I probably will, I will have to spend extra money on gas and car maintenance. It may not seem like a lot, but it is when the entire spending money my family has in a month is less than $100. What am I supposed to do when my daughters need new shoes or have to go to the dentist? How is our family supposed to sacrifice any more than what we have already sacrificed? Do YOU know what that’s like to go from two salaries to one, to live on $37,800, only slowly rising to $50,000, which has barely made it tolerable to support us all? Have YOU ever had to decide between paying exorbitant medical bills or going into debt over health insurance costs?

Can’t I be a little bitter? Can’t I come to the place I work and share camaraderie with people who are all frustrated, downtrodden, stressed, and where the morale is lower than it’s been in years, and say what I think? Say how I am feeling without you smiling to my face and going behind my back and complaining to my boss and making me cry for three days and feel that my entire character has been destroyed in front of the person who is responsible for me having a job???

Can’t I be a little bitter? At least you know who I am, know what I think, and never question the validity of what I say and the truth of my soul. I don’t hide who I am from anyone, and if you can’t handle it, tell me, leave the conversation, relate it to a friend who can approach me, fuck, send me an anonymous note. But don’t backstab me when our employers, the recession, the taxpayers, the state are already twisting a knife into each of our backs.

Oh, did you think I was bitter before? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

How to Live on ONE Salary in Today’s World, Day Three

/ lovizmytrio / 3 Comments

Without a doubt, living on one salary has its challenges, and by far the biggest one for us, or anyone, is health insurance. This is tricky. We have dealt with health insurance over the years using many different methods, none of which are ideal. When I stayed home with the girls and Bruce didn’t have health insurance through his employer, we bought independent health insurance that covered NOTHING. I mean, we were paying almost $400 a month and every time we went to the doctor we had to pay towards our deductible, meaning the full bill. We finally just gave up, because all we were doing was paying, paying, paying, and receiving no benefits.

So when I returned to work as a teacher, I received full benefits, but the costs for the family were exorbitant: upwards of $500 per month. We knew that there was no way we could afford it, so we didn’t even consider it. I know what you’re thinking: what would we do if something tragic happened? Is it worth the risk? No one can answer that question for us; it was a risk we were willing to take at the time.

Luck plays a hand when you are making good choices for your family, I think. Just a few weeks into teaching I came across a flyer that advertised CHP+, the state-funded health care program for children. Of course, with my minuscule salary at the time, we qualified! So since we put our kids on that health insurance, we have an annual bill of a whopping $35 and co-pays of just $5.

Unfortunately, we could not afford to have Bruce on any health insurance until I had been working for more than two years and I received a couple of raises. Even then, it was a struggle to afford, but we managed until they changed the insurance. Now we are back in the same boat, risking the possibility of injury or illness to save money… but what can we do? What else can we cut? It is a terrible choice for a family to have to make, but it is our choice.

Back to our remaining $350… that easily covered the trash, about $20 per month, $80 for the phone bill, $150 for gas, and just a measly $100 for EVERYTHING else. I’m not going to lie. It wasn’t always easy. When we had to get the car fixed, when pipes froze, or when some other emergency happened, we had to put everything on a credit card, which I hate to do. But another huge benefit of having one income is a large tax return every year, so whenever we have to use the credit card, we are always able to pay it off with a portion of our tax return. And we never, in the four and a half years of living on one salary, have had to pay off more than $1500 on our credit card, leaving us with spending money!!

Yes, spending money! We have actually been able to take at least two vacations every year since this shift in salaries. One year, when I gave birth to baby number three and had an enormous amount of medical bills related to this, our tax return was so generous that we were able to take the whole family to Mexico for a week.

Vacations aside, what we have truly purchased with our one income is priceless. With a full time dad taking care of the children and the home, the errands, the grocery shopping, the cleaning, and cooking dinner every night, I do not endure the harried existence of many working mothers. And because of the multiple weeks of vacation time and holidays a teacher has, we have more family time than almost any other family I know. So, despite all the sacrifices and stresses we have faced over the years, it has been worth every minute of worry and every penny not received. We have a stronger, calmer, healthier, happier family, and no one could ever put a price on that.

How to Live on ONE Salary in Today’s World, Day One

/ lovizmytrio / 2 Comments

I am going to write for several days about a question that I often encounter from many people who tell me, time and again, that they think it is impossible for their families to live on one salary. To me, after so many years of hearing this, I find it almost offensive when I hear people say that. If it is possible for us, why can’t it be possible for other people? We are certainly not wealthy by any means. I make $50,000, but when we started doing this, my salary was just $37,800.

So many people are losing their jobs now that this might be something they not only have to consider, but have to live with. So these few blog posts will be about how we do it.

In 2005 I was happily staying home with my two young children and taking care of another little girl for $550 a month while my husband worked full time earning about $40,000 per year. We had a comfortable life, filled with vacations, and were able to save a little money every month. Then he received the news that his job would be coming to an end within six months, and I knew what I was going to have to do: go back to work. As much as I hated the idea of working and leaving my then-two-and-a-half-year-old and nine-month-old at home without me, I didn’t want to lose everything we had. Part of that everything, as a personal and VERY important choice for us, was keeping our kids out of daycare. Bruce never went to daycare growing up and had a very close relationship with his mother. I, on the other hand, spent my childhood with various babysitters, and have too many negative experiences to count (nothing horrific—just neglectful). So that was one of the many priorities we had in mind when we were faced with this challenge.

We made a plan. The first part, as difficult as this was to accept at the time, was to eliminate all debts other than our mortgage. Unfortunately, the only way for us to do this was to completely drain our $12,000 in savings. We paid off the rest of my small student loans, our credit card debt, and a loan we had taken to put siding on our house. This brought our bills down by $230 a month, which may not sound like a lot, but it can make a huge difference.

One thing that we did not have, which most people do, was a car payment. Both of us had cars and both were long paid off. I think this is the single most important factor determining a family’s ability to live on one salary. In my opinion, there is almost NO reason to ever have a car payment. What is the purpose of a car? It is to get you where you need to go. There is no reason that I can imagine why anyone should ever buy a new car. And if you need to upgrade to a larger car, as we found out later that same year, expecting baby number three, that we would need to do, find a way to make it work! We used our tax refund ($4000) and sold our old Explorer ($3000) and bought a minivan with cash.

So, to return to my story, the only debt we had, and more or less still have, is our mortgage, which in my mind hardly counts as debt. Another thing to consider is where you live. We certainly don’t live in a fancy house in the most beautiful neighborhood around. We live in, gasp, Aurora!! Ghetto central, right? Come on, your home is what you make it. We have never experienced any crime that I know of. We don’t lock our doors—car or house. We live in a quiet cul-de-sac that our kids play out in with the neighbors’ kids just about every day of the year—similar to any other cul-de-sac in any other suburb, but without the fancy HOA or whatever it is that makes people feel so special about where they live. That being said, our house payment is around $1400 a month.

When I first started working, I was bringing home $2600. Ouch. Do the math. That left us just $1200 for all the rest of our bills. Much higher than the 51% or less of the take-home income that you would get approved for if you were applying for a mortgage… But we did it… and if you read tomorrow’s blog post, I will tell you how.