Staying at a Low Paying Job

                                                       
                                                         "Supporting Hubby's Bald Head"




Sometimes staying at a low paying job is worth the consequences and after weighing the options, one continues on in such a job. We are at this point.

Some days, on my good days I wonder...... am I good enough to go back to work? I seriously consider it and think of what jobs in our area are available for the afternoon shifts. This is the shift I would be able to work with only having one vehicle..... a shift that would ensure me and hubby working alternating shifts and only seeing each other in passing. Yet every time I even THINK about such a feat...... I get a reality check with a chemo crash lasting anywhere from 2 to 5 days. Or I even get a bad month like pretty much all of JUNE that tells me NOPE not even close to being ready for the work force yet!

On another note hubby has revealed to me his desire to look for a better paying job and we have discussed this in great length. It almost puts us in a catch 22 situation where it boils down to right now, we are stuck with what we have.

Yes his job at the moment is low paying, he has made raises in the 3 years he has been there that brings us to just .25 cents above minimum  wage. Yet because he has been there for the length he has been there and because he is a very hard working dependable employee they look at him as family. This gives him the freedom to get whatever days off he needs to take  me to treatments and also no worries for last minute notices of not being able to work for my emergency room visits.

They are very aware with what we are going through as a family and they freely give him the flexibility we need right now.

A new job may pay better, but would most likely not offer that kind of flexibility as a new employee that has to prove himself yet as a loyal and dedicated worker. If we lived within walking distance from the hospital, it would be a different story , but we don't it is a nice little drive and hubby makes sure he takes me just in case I have a reaction to the chemo and can get back home.

So far now we continue on for it is what it is and we are very thankful his job has been so generous and kind to us and giving us what we need to get the treatments as we need them and as they change throughout all this time. Hubby is even now in a competition and if he continues winning....they have even offered to take me to chemo for him so he can go to the main event if he gets that far in the competition!

Sometimes the benefits that go beyond the paycheck, makes it worth staying put. :)

Mystery Shopping

I applied about 3 months ago to a couple of companies for Mystery Shopping and was called the other day by one of them. With only 1 car and hubby working some very funky shifts, I need things on my end to be very flexible which Mystery Shopping fits that bill.

Today I have my first assignment and I am kind of excited about it and plan to take hubby with me. Although it really does not pay well, it is a free date day with a few dollars for gas money spent. We will see how it goes but have been told that once I do this first assignment I will then get a rating and have priority over future ones.

I have also read that typically the longer you stay with a company, not only the more assignments you will recieve, but you will get better pay as well. We shall see how it goes!

Today it is for a sandwich shop where we will be reimbursed for the food we order and then a small flat fee will be paid for filling out the form after visiting.  This will also allow us to try places we may not have thought to try before.

With a tight budget that really does not allow for entertainment though, this is a nice way for us to be able to have free or very low cost date days if nothing else so yeah I am good with that! Not always with hubby either but it will allow me to have one on one date days with my kids sometimes too which are times I totally cherish!

With a beautifully mild sunny day in the 50's, a dinner date with my sweet hubby and an evening home with my kids watching Bones, what more could a mama want? A great way to re-charge my batteries before cooking a Thanksgiving feast here in a couple of days!


Have you ever been a Mystery Shopper? What did or do you think of the experience?

Why on Earth Only 14k a Year?

This question was posed on another blog when I made a comment offering a few tips on how someone on a lean budget of $50k a year with 4 kids could trim the fat a little. Someone else questioned me right back asking

"Why on earth are you making just $14k a year? I’d really like to know your story. Your comment offers great advice. You’re obviously a thinker and very resourceful. How is it you’re not making at least double your income. It’s just not making sense to me."

And then...

"Ok. A quick glance at the blog, and it seems this standard of living is her conscious choice."


If you notice, it was not mean, sarcastic and ill intended in anyway, it was a genuine question- at least that is how it appeared to me. Yet I lost sleep over it! This question really, really bothered me and I  tossed and turned, mulling it over well through half the  night.

Many times over the years I have questioned the fact that if I consider myself an somewhat intelligent woman ( which I do most days!) why is it I never seem to fully break out of the poverty cycle? What is it exactly that keeps me and holds me there.

Is it a conscious choice? Have we become immune and complacent with it?  Is it because we chose to not go to college? A past history that still stops us today?  Generational Poverty? Lack of resources? Lack of time? What exactly is it?

I am a thinker and resourceful because of low income levels in childhood as well as adulthood.

Yet if I asked myself these questions a hundred times, why is it that it bothered me and shook me to my core when a stranger asked primarily the same question?  The quick addition of the taking a quick glimpse at my blog makes it seem this standard of living is a conscious choice bothered me even more.

As I lay awake most of the night,asking myself a ton of questions and giving a deep period of self-examination I started to realize a few things.

Our initial choices most certainly were conscious and I have written about that here before that we are where we are now from the choices we have made along the way that led us here.

When hubby had his 2 heart attacks with a third on it's way any day, we left a $30,000 a year job that would of gone to $50,000 within a couple months.........at the expense of a dead husband or open by pass surgery needed at the very least.  This was  most certainly a conscious choice and moving 1800 miles away for drastic change was also a conscious choice.

It was NOT our choice this all hit in 2008 and we moved to a very RURAL area in North Carolina at the crash of the economy. It was NOT our conscious choice that were were there a whole year and driving up to 50 miles away to every town we could find and for a whole year there was NO WORK AT ALL.  We lived off our garden, scrap metaling (heavy competition at the time down there!) and wild game. I also freelanced articles which later got bought out from another company and I was no longer willing to write $2 articles when I had been getting $10 for them.

It was again our choice to move back to Michigan to be closer to family, but not our choice in where we ended up.Everyone kept backing out at the last minute after we thought we secured a rental as they got scared about whether we would find work and did not like the fact I was a freelancer.

1 hour before we hit the road I got our current homes landlord who is self employed and was homeschooled to agree we could move in and we would see him in 12 hours ( how long it took us to drive) We wound up in a very, rural area of Michigan where for the first year and a half they did not even have any form of high speed Internet here! Dial-up was the ONLY option!

As far as why we only make $14k a year I can only guess some of the reasons may be

Rural America- Rural America which is where I have always chosen to live is quite different than Metropolitan or Urban areas. Resources are limited at best and while housing is MUCH cheaper in rural areas most work is limited to a couple fast food restaurants in town, Walmarts  and a factory or 2 ( which hubby was denied employment to because his heart attacks were less than 5 years old)

Another issue with rural America is that to be honest, I get to the point where much of the time, I am comfortable and don't push myself as much as I should because EVERYONE we know makes the same income! I know one person making more than $18,000 a year and they struggle more than I ever have because they have no clue how to manage money!

People online may seem baffled about our income level, but in my world, everyone we know is making the same amount so in our world - we are the NORMAL. I can not imagine a $50,000 a year income and in part, I am sure that is a problem, not being able to see it, or imagine it can make it harder to obtain.

Growing up we were poor, my friends were poor and this never really changed for me as an adult, they say to surround yourself with financially successful people if you yourself want that.....well so far the only way I have been able to do that is ONLINE because I never meet anyone locally who earns a decent living! My world is surrounded with families in the same boat and their stories, many times we fair far better because of my skills.

Sick Twisted Pride- This one hit me last night, that I actually do get a sense of pride in my resilience and ability to do whatever it takes to  live on what we make, carry no debt, do not use credit cards, and trying to get it to where we live below our means in order to build an emergency fund. I do take pride on feeding my family well on very little, not buying tons of unneeded clothes, riding a bike for 15 miles when needed........whatever.

Health-We seem to have way more than the Average Americans health issues and that most certainly plays a role in our income levels. I wont go into it all but Hubby, myself, and our 2 youngest children have had serious serious health issues over the last 10 years that it is not funny and on more than one occasion had to face the possibility of each one of them dying.

NEED- While I most certainly would love and do work on increasing our income, we live at a level that we manage quite well and do not have a need for tons of money ( which to me $40,000 or more a year is a ton of money!)  As stated our rental payments are extremely low and therefore we simply do not have need for tons of money. If we made that kind of money we would be saving over $20,000 and to be honest I am not sure why I  would have need to save that kind of money every year. So in this respect I suppose it is a conscious choice. 

Standard of Living- This is different for everyone but for me I do not know why this is brought up on a regular basis, our standard of living is no different than others living on far greater of an income. The only difference is my roof over my head is not overly excessive,  it is small but comfortable But do we not technically have the same standard of living that most others have? We have a roof over our heads, clothes on our backs, good food on our tables ( never missing a meal ever) family, friends, trips and vacations, eating out occasionally and new experiences on a regular basis. Why is our standard of living considered so low in others perspectives? We have game systems, TV, computers and things of that nature I call "fluff" other than our home is 750 square feet rather than 2,000 does not make our standard of living lower than another.

Poverty is suppose to mean that one can not even cover the basics of needs, complete destitute, this is NOT US.

Time-most certainly plays a factor, my husband works 9-5 and it is my job to do everything else. I am the one doing all the finances, budgets, researching new savings ideas, homeschooling, gardening, foraging wild foods, housecleaning, cooking, freelance writing, blogging, self-reliant activities, home business ideas (even though they all failed for 2012)making all foods from scratch, preserving harvests, you name it, I do it..... this takes considerable time and frankly I do not have much energy left to put into much more. Do I need to prioritize? Most certainly but for now I feel very scattered and energy depleted by all that falls on my shoulders and really need a mental vacation at this point. But I keep plugging on and pushing through  it.


Off to think on this matter more.........especially why is it that this comment bothered me so much?  Maybe because I tend to complicate things and I am missing the simple route to rise above? Or is it that I really see nothing wrong with our income level yet know we are really capable of much more?

Have I sold myself and deluded myself into giving up into thinking this is as good as it will ever get?

Do I give up my goals to early in the game? Not that they fail, but that I do not keep trying long enough for them to succeed?

I have many questions circling in my head right now yet I am thankful for the person leaving the comment to really have me go into deep reflection in search of some answers I have not asked myself in a long time now.........

 

There Goes the Raise.........

Well with a great deal of reserve, hubby had told his work he would move up to management. Even though he had been a manager for restaurants for 12 years, it is still standard procedure to go through the training program if management did not occur for that particular restaurant.

Hubby was really, really good at what he did and had the reputation of being able to flip restaurants. By this I mean, he could go into the worst one, who had the worst staff, filthiest, losing money off the charts ones, and within a couple months have it the best liked and highest money earning one in the chain. Because of this, he puts a whole lot of stress on his shoulders as he takes it very seriously and does not mess around. One of the reasons it led to his 2 heart attacks by age 38. He also tends to receive more than the average managers duties placed on him because he is so good at it, where they just expect so much more out of him than other employees or managers.

2 days before he was suppose to start training, he had one of those days where they had him working on some management thing's, short staffed, employees not wanting to work, and the anxiety attacks hit, putting his heart attacks into the very front of his thoughts as his stress levels climbed to levels he just could not bear. He realized by stepping back up into management, he would be placing himself back into heart attack threats.

And so, told them no, he was no longer interested in moving up.


While this blows financially,  I fully support him as this is something I worry about all the time and have always told him, more money is NOT worth another heart attack. We will make do and find another way......

His staying alive is a tad more important.........

I will just have to work on a different plan altogether.....    :)

Bottoms-Up

What goes up, must come down. What goes down, must come up.

When at the bottom, there is only one way to go...........UP!


Financial cycles seem no different, at least in our home and this last year has been no secret that it has been tight. We have been on the broken bottom rung dangling dangerously to the absolute bottom yet seem to always somehow get through it.

Hubby is up for a raise which is a good thing, however he has to go through  a 6 week training which is stuff he knows but is a formality. The raise would be implemented at the END of the 6 weeks. The downfall of this is that training occurs in another town that would mean a round trip of 50 miles a day.

That is 50 miles a day in a truck that only gets 12 miles to the gallon, right now we do 10 a day for work and being only 5 miles from town costs us $200 a month in gas! So 50 miles a day is going to hit us really hard and is making me a little stressed out. The end result is a good thing, but the getting us  there is going to dangle us just a little closer to where our toes can practically scrape the bottom. Take a big breath, we will manage and everything will work out!

I know we can do it and we are doing it for a $1.40 an hour raise. I know that does not sound like much but after minimum wage for so long that raise will have huge impacts for the better and give us some breathing room.

At the same time, by the time the raise comes into the picture, we will be making our last truck payment ( last payment EVER and then strict a cash only lifestyle forever and ever and ever yeah!)

The last payment means we will have freed up an additional $180 a month  along with getting a raise giving us some breathing room of an additional $400 a month! I can not wait, this is very exciting for me.

So that's where things are, we have to allow ourselves to slip just a little bit further on the last broken rung of the ladder, in order to finally after a long 3 year stretch of struggling at the bottom.

It feels good........ 

Another One Bites the Dust

It always seems we have a plateau that we can never cross, oh we have ups and downs as with any typical cycle like anyone else. The problem is the Ups have this plateau, a brick wall that every time we hit, something comes along to knock us down a few rungs on the ladder. SIGH life story happening here.

Things have been smoothing out, if you have followed this blog from the beginning, you would know how rough last summer was for us. Yet we found our true grit, persevered and made it through somehow, and never missed a meal....a blessing and miracle in itself for what we had to work with.

This year we have been doing so much better, and enjoying life once again....not merely in survival mode. Even with overspending in May, June has been seeing us get all caught up and things taken care of. We have increased income by $3,000 a year which has been in large the credit for us being able to enjoy simply luxuries such as ordering a pizza once in a while, or even going out to eat occasionally, putting my daughter into art workshops, getting fishing gear and licenses, camping, and even the things we needed to put a garden in and some chickens. I know right? $3,000 added to annual income makes a huge difference when your income is at a bottom tier for earnings!

Life has been good.

And then my son's father came this morning to pick him up for Fathers Day weekend and.........


notified me that he is being permanently laid off as his plant shuts down so yeah no child support will be coming.

And there goes the $3,000 annual increase to our income shoving us back to the bottom starting line again. SIGH yup life story! Every time we start breathing and start to make a little progress in getting ahead.......every time something comes along to knock my big ego out of the sky.

Now on a positive note, yes I know, everything happens for a reason, and in everything, good and bad lies hidden opportunities. And we do have the garden to fall back on thank my stars, already an improvement from last year!

So this weekend will have me pouring over finances, making adjustments, looking for opportunities and problems solving to come up with some realistic solutions. Realistic is not always my strong suit, I am an idealist by nature , an over achiever in many ways and tend to be overly optimistic in establishing budgets or setting goals......um yeah just look at my 2012 goals to get my point... a tad overly optimistic! LOL

Off to the drawing board and thinking shit out..................

Penny Thots looking for a couple more writers.

Contact Jt at pleben.com@gmail.com

This is a great opportunity and JT the founder of www.pennythots.com/
 is looking for a couple of writers to add to his team. He offers an excellent compensation package with unique profit sharing opportunities, you may have to be patient as this is a new site and still getting established.

The writers he has on the team (including myself) is a very diverse group of financial bloggers. If you are interested send him an email and he can give you the details.

What makes you stop for Yard Sales?

Need I say more? LOL I am just curious as many of you know I am venturing into an ongoing Garage/Yard Sale this year from a side business perspective.

You can help make it great by leaving a comment and letting me know what it is for you that will make you stop everytime at a garage sale.

Is it the not being able to see the items? ( garage or canopy shelter)

Is it HOW it is set up?

What Items do you want to see that will make you stop?

Is it the amount of stuff?

Anything you can think of let me know in the comments to let me know what will get you to stop!


( for me I stop at almost any unless it is a tiny table with like 5 items on it LOL)

Date Day That Pays You Money!

It was a beautiful day today and hubby came home with a muffler to throw in our scrap metal pile. He told me he had found it in town by the rail road tracks and next thing I knew with purse in tow and a couple of 5 gallon buckets thrown into Bronco Bob, we headed back off to town!

We found a place to park and walked the brush line about 100 feet down the ttracks and found other steel plates and metal objects that actually had good weight on them. Now it is illegal to take any part of rail road tracks such as pins and such to a scrap recycling center so we made sure all the metal objects were from other things such as cars and what have you's.

We find these kind of date days to be the most fun of all!

We get to be outside treasure hunting and laughing together and being the kind of woman I am, I am not afraid to work hard, get absolutely filthy, nor lift heavy items.

We spend no money, we actually make money and these are usually last minute spontaneous days we get to spend time together without the kiddos.

It also helps clean up the earth and it's trash litter!

Now granted, copper is the best, steel prices are quite low but when you find a bunch of steel that are objects between 30 and 60 pounds it adds up quick and can give ya a nice little cash in!

After we walked the first 100 feet, we went back to the truck and moved it down so we could walk another 100 feet.

The 100 feet was about all we could do as the metal objects were being too heavy to carry much of.

All in all we collected about 200 pounds of metal in about a 30 minute time frame that we brought home and with the other metal we already had will head to the recycle center another day this month. We are thinking of going back tomorrow to head in the other direction we did not hit today.

Another bonus was going down a side street we have not been before we saw a little garage sale sign.

When we checked it out, the prices were so dirt cheap we knew it was the perfect spot to pick up several items for our YARD SALE business we will be holding this summer!

The things we purchased are so low, even if we raise the prices they will still be prices at a steal where we can earn a small profit and somebody else still gets a great buy!

Today was fun!

I LOVE HAVING FUN AND BEING PAID TO DO SO! THE BEST DATE DAYS EVER!

What $3,000 Annual Increase Has Done For Us

2011 netted us around a very unimpressive $14,000 for the year so it kind of got stuck in my head that yeah nice, we make $14,000 a year. ( We did it though and actually lived to tell about it AND never missed a meal, so perhaps the income was not impressive but the fact we lived on it and how was quite impressive!)

As the start of 2012, I never gave it much thought and have our base survival budget at $1400 a month. Someone pointed out how can that be, $14,000 a year would mean around $1060 a month, hmmmmm that's right, I remember now 2012 is bringing an increase of income! WOW no wonder our budget this year looks so much better than last year! We will be (if things continue on the way they are at the moment anyways) earning $16,800 -$17,000 this year!

The reason being that our adult daughter did not pay anything as she was paying on a bill that got ran up when we lived in the South. 2012 has her helping by paying a little for room and board which helps our income out as well as hubby has been consistently getting 40 hour work weeks rather than 20 hour work weeks we saw quite a bit of in 2011.

Yet what does this $3,000 annual increase mean for us exactly?  So much more than I ever really thought about at our income levels! That extra a month has basically what is allowing us to save $100 a month ( which will help cover months hubby MAY get hours cut to 20 hour weeks!) AND allowed us to drastically increase our investing to $200 a month.

There was no increase in our spending, our spending will be remaining the same. While the budget has changed some as some bills got cut, others increased, the actual spending still remains around $1060 a month with only a slight increase by maybe $20  to $40. The BULK of our increased income is being put to work for us and finally having our money work beneficially for us rather than us working for money.

Years ago, we would of used the extra money simply to increase our spending so this is a huge achievement for us to not increase our spending but put the extra money into working for us. This in itself is lifting large amounts of stress from my shoulders and showing us it can be done, even on small income levels. Perhaps it was easy as I did not even stop to notice our income increased this year, I simply laid out a sound survival budget that included the increase automatically into the savings and investing portion of the budget!

So yeah even a $3,000 annual increase can make all the difference in the world......

Increasing Income With Garage Sales

I have not talked too much yet about increasing income, in part because food is usually an area that always can be reduced. I do talk a lot about food or share recipes! While food is a necessity, it also is usually an area many way overspend in and so is a quick way to reduce it in order to instantly free up extra cash.

Through the colder months, I also like to hibernate a little more and really did not expect to work a whole lot in the increasing income areas other than blogging ventures that is.

 However nicer weather is here, spring is in the air and I do have plans on putting several things into action in order to increase our income while retaining the integrity of sticking to our survival budget
I have a plan on what we will do with the extra money but will share that in an upcoming post!

With nice weather here, one of the ways I plan on increasing income is thinking Garage Sale. Now some it due to items we need to get rid of but I am not talking about the Garage Sale you have in order to sell things you bought for LESS than what you bought it for initially.

What I am talking about is having a perpetual ongoing garage sale as a business with the main idea to earn a little bit more than what you bargained a price for it so you turn a small profit.

I love Garage Sales in all forms, love to go and shop at them, love the bargaining and haggling aspects of it, love the fact it is time spent outdoors, love mingling with the people and I love to hold them.

I have already been out and about scouting for items to buy specifically with the mindset of if it is a good item to purchase in order to resell.

My entrepreneurial minded 10 year old daughter also loves this idea and actually plans on having her own table!

We happen to be in a prime location, a main short crossroad between two main highways , plenty of flat open yard and in a great garage sale area. We also plan on doing some traveling this summer to family and camping areas that would allow us to shop other garage sales out of our primary area to be able to bring in new things.

We have some good ideas we may want to add to this theme as well. When we get the ball rolling, I will do a few updates to let you know how it is going with this income increasing idea.

Keep on truckin on!

Our Tax Refund Plan

Well it is no secret, hubby really did not make much for 2011, a whopping $13,900 gross wages! Pathetic I know, I suppose it should be a consolation that we were listening on the news the other day about how central Michigan has been hit the hardest in the down economy. They went on to say that in 2008 at the collapse of the economy Flint lost 13 percent of their jobs and since then, only 3 percent has been restored.

In any case another part of the equation is that hubby has not moved up to management although when they hired him, that is what they wanted as he has 13 years of restaurant management experience. Yes this has been by choice, after hubby had 2 heart attacks at age 38, we decided a little more money was not worth an early funeral. We would much rather make a lower wage and have the sweetheart of a man live a long life! Between the stress and his lack of discipline in horrid fast food diets when he is a manager..........it is just simply not worth it, not to mention if anyone knows anything about restaurant management knows that having a family life outside of work is just impossible. We use to try  to  go out to eat and wind up sitting in a car for HOURS while he bounced from store to store ( he managed a couple at once) or go on vacation just to get calls of where the heck was he. Picnics or a day at the beach always had to be cancelled, or well any plans always seemed to get cancelled. We got phone calls at all hours of night and day where everything had to be dropped, including leaving stores in the middle of grocery shopping! IT SUCKED!

Anyways on top of his $13,900 we did have an additional $4,000 from alternative sources come it for a whopping $17,900 annual income for a family of 5 that happens to rent. Doable but very very very hard.

One of the things that made it difficult is that hubby's hours can bounce all over the place, one month getting 40 hours a week, the next month or two getting 20 to 30 hours a week. The times it is only 20 hours a week leaves us juggling bills all over the place as there is just not enough to go around for everything and we already keep our bills fairly low.

But now it is tax season and I was able to get them done yesterday, being very pleased with what we are getting back!

It is a nice fairly large sum for this year, so our plan is to have it refunded to us on a re loadable debit card. We then will be using the refund to boost our income for 12 months which will greatly increase our quality of life and easily tide us over in months hours from work are crap.

I figured a re loadable debit card will be the easiest to manage for this project and can easily deduct a certain amount each month from it to add to our monthly income.

This will mean no stressing over how low propane is getting, no stressing over what bills to juggle and allow us to breath the whole year round.

Many people that are in financial situations as ours typically use a large refund to SPEND IMMEDIATELY, to catch up on their mortgage, shop for all those things they think they want or go on an expensive vacation. While the fun lasts a month or two, they end up running out and going back to struggling the next 10 months of the year until tax refund time where they repeat the process all over.

Me? I would rather rest easier all year round, What do you think?

Do you think this is a wise decision or would you do something else?