When Life throws Curve Balls

I know I have been delinquent in posting lately, but as a rule work, and family must always come first. Work, has been busy, and family just as busy. So for that I apologize but I hope everyone has not lost hope, and will continue to visit my blog. So now for my humble explanation.

Work. Working where I do we have slow and peak times. The end of July is always particularly busy as we do annual reconciliations, and I am responsible for validating that the folks we reconcile are duly notified. So it’s been a lot of long hours over the last week or so, but will slow down towards the end of this week. I must say I actually enjoy the busy times at work as they keep me on my toes, and I would rather be busy than slow, and bored.

And then there is family. With that comes some standard stuff, and the unexpected, and oh boy when something is unexpected, it can truly be both scary, and exciting, and depending on the moment I can be either one. More on that later in the post, because I have to keep you interested somehow.

I am now even more aggressively trying to organize out debt. Mostly because of the yet to be described “unexpected” that is forthcoming. The amount of interest I am paying is extreme, and one of my cards, wants to raise the rate to 32%. That of course is because of my debt load. I’ll be honest I never applied for this card, but they bought the bank that I had the card through, and I haven’t really enjoyed the customer service. I actually had had a card from this bank a few years ago, and cancelled them because of their service. So I am in the process of letting my 717 FICO score help me get lower interest rates. I also did some research and found that If I take the cards that have the highest balances, and enroll them through a Debt Management plan then I would not hurt my score more than a point or so, as all my debt is current. And they will allow me to keep the two cards I have at zero, for emergencies. Though we don’t charge anymore. One of the things I had to realize is how we got here, and much of it was my doing. Yes we had a lot of necessary debt, but a portion of it was that prior to last year I was a single person, and didn’t adapt to the cost of raising children as quickly as I should have. One word of caution though is to make sure you look into reputable organizations like CCCS, which are accredited by the government as reputable. Much of this though is preliminary as we have to see how many hours my wife will be working when she starts her new job in a few weeks.

Now on to the children. Will will be having surgery next week to remove his tonsils. So we have been getting all of our ducks in a row with insurance and so forth. Jon is still in the stream of his ESY, and his forced tennis. In addition both children were grounded in the last week, at separate times for separate reasons, but never the less, it does make evening livelier, when you have to deal with children, who are grounded. On a positive note, we did take up bike riding. We made it 13 miles this weekend. I know you will all be happy to hear I have recovered.

I will say that with family come surprises. I became a Dad last year to two great kids. But as I said above sometime things happen unexpectedly that are unexpected and both exciting and scary all at once. Thursday was just that day. Thursday morning my wife had gone for a doctor’s appointment, as she had not been feeling very well. Thursday afternoon they called her back and told her she was 5 weeks pregnant! While we had talked about have more kids in another year or so, we wanted an opportunity to work on our debt and settle everything with the two kids we have, so needless to say this was both unexpected, and now it even pushes us harder to get our finances straight. So I will be a Dad….again.

So I hope you will all forgive me for my absence, and will check in again.
~Another Day

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