It Has Been a While

It has been a long month full of changes.  I have a few other posts saved on my desktop that I wrote offline, but I thought I would start fresh.

1. MOVING
Things fell through with my MIL again so we decided to move forward with an apartment.  With us giving our foster care license up and losing a roommate, we are still a family of 6. We NEED a 4 bedroom apartment to make it work. Luckily, so I thought, their have been about 6 new apartment complexes with 4 bedrooms that have been built in the past few years with 10 miles of our house. Easy, right? Well APPARENTLY all of them are part of an affordable housing initiative. The get big subsidies from the State and Fed to build as long as they follow certain guidelines. One of those guidelines is an income cap.  We have to make less than 62k a year to live in them and we make 67k. 

There are no 4 bedroom apartment complexes in the area that aren't part of this initiative so an apartment was out. I started looking at houses.  The cheapest I could find would be only $300 dollars less a month and we would not be able to bring all of our dogs with us.  When I did the math, it would take over 1.5 years to recoup the money we spent to move. Why put in all that work to move if it is going to take years to see any results.

So I did the math, and we decided to take the money we had saved for moving and we paid off a credit card and the car payment.  We ended up savings $375 dollars in monthly payments.  I forecasted until the end of 2017 and if we stay on budget we could buy my sisters car with cash, put a sizeable down payment on another (keeping the monthly payments down under 150) and free up another 900 dollars a month by the end of 2017. 

If we continue with that goal, we should be able to put a 10% payment down on a home by summer of 2019.  I think that is a pretty good plan.  I am sad we are not moving because there is a TON of stuff I don't like about this house, but not having the pack clean, unpack, clean and resettle the entire family is a plus.

2. WEIGHT - Rosie, DD1 and myself are still going to strong on weight watchers.  As of last Sunday I am down 13.8 pounds.  The eating habits are becoming second nature.  My head still swims when I realize I still have 115 pounds to go, but I got this. Rosie and I got Fitbit Charge HR's. My daily steps is pitiful.  I was working on bring it up, but am giving myself a break for reasons you will see in the next paragraph.

3. CIGARETTES: Yesterday, I bit the bullet and put on my first nicotine patch.  It has been 24 hours and I admit it has been tough.  I was successful 2 other times with quitting smoking (5years and 1 year) and I don't remember it being this hard. DD1 was so nice to comment that it was probably because I was getting old.  I am staying strong and am hoping that this will pass quickly.  I am still getting the nicotine so right now I am just fighting the physical act of smoking and the jump in nicotine when times get stressful. Once I have those under control, I will start lowering the strength of patch. I am hoping by March to be completely nicotine free.

4. BUDGET: I talked a lot about this in the moving portion of the post.  I have to revamp how I handled savings at the end of the year because December was a mess. I didn't watch our budget at all in January and had to get a small payday loan to get through the end of the month.  With our tax return I have a chunk in savings to make sure that doesn't happen again.

I finally got paid for the side job. It was about 3 hundred less than expected, but I made it work. I got a tax advocate for the 2013 taxes. She was suppose to call me yesterday with an update but still no word.  She did say we should have this all taken care of by the end of the month. that 2.7k would definitely help boost my savings account.

5. JOB: I was so sure I was going to get fired the beginning of February but they gave me another month. I got a phone interview from my little sisters work and am going in for basic testing on Friday.  The following week will be an in person interview and if that goes well a drug test (which I will pass).  They said they would start training on March 7th. I am hoping they will offer me the job before the end of the month so I can give myself a week off in between jobs.

Another piece of good news is that the insurance kicks in the 1st day of the month after you are hired. Only have 1 month of no insurance relieves a lot of stress. I am nervous that the insurance rate to cover the entire family will be to high. Currently I work for a health insurance company so I have the entire family insured for very little compared to most companies. All of my kids, except my eldest, have state insurance as part of their adoption agreement so I may only insure Rosie and myself if the price is to high. I really like having the kids double insured but it may not be financial feasible right now.  DD1 would qualify to get state insurance on her own so everyone would be insured.


That is life for now. Plans will change at least 100 times before my weight, smoke free, debt free and buying house goals are done but, right now, I feel like I am on track.