First of all, be smart. Craigslist is a safe place to sell old furniture, baby gear, junk etc. Craigslist is not the ideal place to sell electronics or other really expensive items. It’s all about the market and who you are attracting. Chances are, a SAHM is not going to rip you off when you sell her your old stroller. List a stereo, however, and you are opening up the door to the creeps who troll Craigslist for crime opportunities.  If you really want to sell your nice stereo, make sure you meet in a public area, like the parking lot at a busy shopping center. Trust your instincts. Be smart!

Know the value. Do your research before listing your item. Know what it is going for on eBay and what the retail value is, and price accordingly. Unless you want to spend a lot of time haggling and dealing with people who only want to pay you bottom dollar, list it for a really good price, but stay firm. In fact I would even write the word “firm” after your price. Just make sure you’re not pricing it too high. If you don’t sell it in 1 or 2 weeks, relist it for a lower price.

Protect your inbox. Craigslist is notorious for inviting a swarm of spammy email after you list something. It’s not Craigslist’s fault, though. You can avoid it by choosing to not link your email or anonymous email when you create your post. Instead, include a phone number and an email address in the body of the post. Put a space on either side of the @ to protect your email. People who really want your item will not mind manually typing in your email address. Or, they’ll just pick up the phone or text.

Be thorough in your listing. The more information you include in your original post, the less time you’ll spend on the phone or at your computer answering questions from potential buyers. Take the time to take a good picture of the item, at several angles, and you’ll screen out the people who don’t really want it based on visual appearance (especially important when listing furniture).

Cash only. I think this is self-explanatory, but you don’t want to deal with bounced checks or fake whatever. Only accept cash and count it before they leave.

I sat down to write this evening after putting Micah down to sleep, and right as I clicked the search button, my browser took a detour and landed on the page you never want to see. It was a screen from Comcast. There was a problem with our account. I thought to myself, “What in the world is it this time?”

When I called, I was prompted with a message that said our service had been disconnected due to nonpayment. Now, I know I can be forgetful sometimes, but I surely did not forget to pay our bill three months in a row.  I know I didn’t skip that bill on purpose, either. So I made the full payment on the phone and waited on the line to talk to a customer service representative. As it turns out, she wasn’t aware of any problems with our e-bill service, but said she would look into it. In the meantime, I set up good old fashioned paper billing and automatic drafts, just to be sure. After all, I make my living off the internet; we can’t have it getting shut off again.

After I got off the phone, I logged into MyCheckFree.com to see if I had really forgot to pay our bill for three months.

I knew I didn’t forget — the bill never came!!

I noticed that the account number was wrong and wondered if that had something to do with it. When I tried entering the one listed on the most recent paper bill we had on file (coincidentally the same account number I gave over the phone with no problems, despite the fact that our paper bill was 2 years old), I got an error message saying the account number didn’t fit the typical format or whatnot associated with the biller. Contact the biller, it said.

Ugh.

His old job was here in Rockford, just 7 minutes from our house. His new job is more like 37 minutes from our house. Our church is in Roscoe, about30 minutes from our house. Eric’s parents live in Roscoe, also about 30 minutes from our house. My parents live just north of the border, about an hour from our house. In short, everything is north and (almost) nothing is in Rockford. I love my house, but I do not love that it is in Rockford anymore. I love that I live so close to my friend Lindsay (four houses away, to be exact), but I am tired of driving a half hour or more to everything else. Sometimes I feel like I am always in the car. I’m also sad that most of the time no one wants to come over because we live too far away. I love to host and I hardly ever get the chance.

I recently e-mailed my realtor and asked him what our prospects looked like for selling. He is just about the opposite of optimistic. I guess I can’t blame him considering the sales of houses in this area lately. But I also keep checking our home value on Zillow. Zillow says our home value continues to rise. It’s nowhere near where it should be yet, but it’s climbing fast. I am more of a glass-half full type person, and I look at these charts and say, “surely we’ll be able to sell next summer, right?”

We need it to get up to around 150K to walk away. We’ve seen it climb from 96K to 126K in the last couple months! That is why I’m really hoping it continues on that path. It would be so great to be able to live within minutes of Eric’s job and our church. It would be great for Micah to live closer to his grandparents as well.

Hey internet, do any of you want to buy an awesome 3 bedroom house in Rockford? It’s just 3 years old and very nice!!! It has 2 1/2 bathrooms, a vaulted ceiling and a fireplace in the great room, a huge kitchen and a 2 1/2 car garage. It is only 15 minutes from Rockford’s main strip (shopping),  just seconds from the bypass which will take you to the interstate. The neighborhood is surrounded by trees and horse farms. The school district is not Rockford, it’s Winnebago (little town, nice school). You will love it, I promise. I will sell it to you for only 152K! You will make my Roscoe dreams come true!

If you’ve been following along, you’ll remember that we listed our house for sale back in October. We had a whole list of reasons for wanted to sell:

#1 Our Life Plan had changed. We had a child sooner than we originally planned and switched to a single income. I originally planned to go back to work part time, but I just couldn’t when the time came. A very affordable house became a nearly unaffordable house as quick as you can say “baby!”

#2 Our city raised its taxes to over ten percent, which is really extreme in our area. Most surrounding cities have rates between 6 and 8 percent. (Property taxes are based on 33.3% of the property value.) The increase in taxes made our house even more unaffordable. 46% of our income, to be exact.

#3 Having a baby made living an hour away from my parents so much harder. I got the itch to move farther north so visits with Grandma and Grandpa could be more frequent and not cost $12-15 in gas every time.

We signed a six month contract with the Realtor but we ended up allowing the listing to expire last month due to the fact that the fair market value for our house had dropped to around $98,000 according to Zillow.

What is most painful about this is the fact that we paid $147,900 for it in 2007. OUCH! We had quite a few showings and not one offer. We had to list it for more than we bought it for to cover Realtor, closing and moving costs, so it’s not like I can blame people for not wanting to spend so much on it when there were homes listed for the low 120s across the street. I guess I was just hoping for a miracle. I was hoping some person with plenty of money to burn would come along and realize that our house was the only one they could possibly buy, whatever the cost. Yeah right…

Plan B

Our new plan is to sit on the house a little longer and hope for the best in terms of the housing market around here. We are working really hard to make things work financially in the mean time. It’s hard spending half of your income on your house, though. We’ve been drastically cutting expenses, but the main thing that needs to change is our income.  Eric has been looking around, but you know how the market is right now.  He has started to look in different cities. If Eric does end up getting a new job farther north, he’ll just have to commute until things turn around.

Our Realtor is not so optimistic. He thinks we should attempt a short sale because he does not expect housing prices to rise much in our neighborhood any time soon, if ever. He blames the location. Okay, even if we were to sell it for less than we bought it, I’d rather wait and hammer down the principle. Short sales are terrible for your credit! Furthermore, I really have a hard time believing the housing prices won’t get back up to the 150s in the next five years. I’m no genius when it comes to real estate, but I do know how much things have fluctuated in the last decade. We didn’t buy our house at its peak value, which was in the 190s. Is there really no chance of making a teenie profit or at least breaking even?

Which brings me to…

Plan C

What if we didn’t move? Ever? I mean, what if we just decided to stay indefinitely? I know our income will increase over the years as Eric gains experience and moves up in his career. Our taxes will go down for the simple fact that our home value has decreased. For those reasons, I know the money part will get better. I can adjust to life a little farther from my family than I’d like. Lots of people live much farther from their grandparents.

I have a love/hate relationship with my house. I love the way it looks and feels – it’s home. I do wish it was a little bit bigger. I wish it had more bedrooms for future children, but then again we could always finish the basement in the future and add a bedroom. I could really use more cabinets and I would love to remodel the dining room to make it feel more separate from the kitchen. I would love to upgrade materials someday: carpet, countertops, etc. I would die for crown molding and a real railing on the stair case instead of the drywall banister. There are tons of little projects I would love to do over the next few decades, but I’ll only entertain those dreams if I can envision us staying put. Why put all that work into a house you’re going to leave anyway?

I wish I knew where we were going to be in ten years. Can I let myself get comfortable in this house and enjoy making little improvements, or should I live as though we may put it back on the market in a few years (no redecorating)? *Sigh* Everything feels so up in the air right now. Not knowing makes this house feel less homey. I don’t know if I can relax or not. I don’t know if we’ll stay so I feel a little unsettled. I really don’t want to go with Plan C because I really want to live closer to my parents, but I also love the idea of never having to move again and just making this house everything I always wanted.

Plan D

D is for “dream.” My dream is that someone would buy our house from us right now – an investment risk of sorts (they’d be banking that the value would increase to the point where they could sell it for profit when the market it ripe) – allowing us to move into a more economical, temporary place, most likely a rental, while we work on Our Total Money Makeover. We would pay off all our debt, build our emergency fund, and then save up enough cash to buy our next house with no mortgage! We’d build – make it fit our family like a glove.  We would be closer to our families and life would center on our family and our faith, not the stress of stretching $1 to cover $5 in expenses. Ick!  Do you think that could ever happen? Probably not. Maybe Barack Obama will buy my house. Hehe.

Ironically, I made my decision to switch a week after buying a jumbo box of Pampers Baby Dry diapers. So my diaper budget is spent for the month and I have to wait until June to order. I have been researching my options like crazy in the meantime. I am going to start out with a basic stash of prefolds and covers, along with a few snappis and a roll of liners. I’m thinking about getting the Bummis starter kit from Nikki’s Diapers, but I haven’t made up my mind yet.  There are so many choices and places to order from! It’s too bad there isn’t a brick-and-mortar store in the area…

I am looking forward to deleting the $45 monthly diaper expense from the budget. I expect the water bill to increase by about $10-15, but saving $30-35 a month will be worth the extra laundry!

After reading this first book, I am so excited about our future. I have been so stressed out by our lack of money for the past year since I quit my job to stay home with Micah. From reading this book, however, I have learned that it’s not just our income that is the problem, it’s our DEBT!! We have a lot of debt. You would not even believe the figure if I told you. It’s embarrassing.

$68,152.89

That’s not even including our mortgage. It’s a combination of student loans, hospital bills and credit card debt. Most of it is student loans. How did we get here?  Honestly, I don’t think we ever realized our debt would follow us this far. And when I look back to when we were buying our house, I realize we had no idea how much property taxes, utilities, repairs, furniture, appliances and other house necessities would jack up the price of home ownership.  Stamp a big DUMB across my forehead. I deserve it.

One thing that has changed since studying Dave’s method is the way we handle the money we do have. Before, I used to make a budget at the beginning of the month, but I would always blow it. Either I would forget about a purchase, run into a problem or buy something on impulse – and it would all go down the drain. I also carried a mentality that I should buy something if I “needed it” regardless of the checkbook balance. I would buy a bunch of groceries and then we’d have no money to pay the water bill. Looking back, I should have shopped a lot smarter. We probably should not have been eating tons of meat and organic veggies. (Now I know how to get a week’s worth of food for under $20.) Can you say “overdraft fees”? I don’t even want to know the total amount that the bank has made off of us in fees. It would probably make me hurl. But that is the past…

Now we are using the envelope system. We make our budget together and we budget things that might happen as well as things we expect. We take out CASH for things like gas and groceries, and when the money runs out, it’s GONE. Too bad, so sad. We NEVER use our credit card anymore. We have combed through our budget and removed everything we can live without.

Before baby step one, which is setting up a $1000 emergency fund, you have to get current on your bills. As of tomorrow, we are finally current!! I am so excited! What a relief to know that the water bill and electric bill, etc. is no longer going to be mailing us pink slips.  We have a little bit in the emergency fund so far, and that will take a lot of work to get it funded, but I am really looking forward to baby step two, which is the debt snowball. There are seven baby steps, which you can read about here.

The main thing that is going to have to change if we are ever going to finish this plan in a decent time window is our income. I already figured that it will take us about 14 years to pay off all our debt if our income never increases. Can you hear me screaming? That is too long! So we are on the hunt. I should say Eric is on the hunt. His boss knows this, but I’m not sure if he realizes how seriously Eric is searching. It’s not just the income either; I need health insurance! I am on my knees every night asking God to address these two areas in our life. But – I know that He has a plan. I believe that we have been struggling the way we have because we would never have learned how to handle our money otherwise. It’s very likely we would have wasted many opportunities. Now that we have a concrete plan to get out of debt, I feel like the doors have been opened. We are standing behind the plate with our glove open and our eyes set on the mound, waiting for the pitch, ready to strike out DEBT for good. I am asking God to provide a way for us to finish baby step two in under three years. Sounds like a miracle, yes, but isn’t God in the business of making miracles happen, particularly when we are determined to do things His way instead of the world’s way?

It curls... if we let it get much longer it would "fro"

A few years ago we spent a little over $30 on a Wahl Clippers set kind of like this one. It has served us well, especially considering it paid for itself after just 3 haircuts.

Cutting your husband’s hair is not as intimidating as it sounds. I was nervous the first time, but the kit we bought came with a great instructional DVD and the actual clippers are pretty foolproof. I use the size 4 comb all over his head first.

If it's warm, I cut his hair outside to skip cleanup.

Then I take the size 2 comb and clip the sides, fading up into the top by bending my wrist at the end of each stroke. Finally, I use the right and left ear pieces to clip around his ears, and lose the comb altogether to shave the back of his neck and clean up the sideburns.

Tah-dah!

I like the way the back of his head feels after I cut his hair. I told him I was going to write on my blog that it feels like peach fuzz, but he didn’t think that sounded manly enough. So we mutually agreed that officially, it feels like the coat of a black stallion.

And of course we need a token shot of Micah, who was watching the whole time from his premier seating area (the pack -n- play).

And yes, his binkie is purple.

Do you cut your family’s hair? Do you use clippers or do you get really creative (brave) with the scissors?

Four years ago, I had great coverage. I worked for Walgreens and my insurance (Blue Cross Blue Shield) covered everything with a very small copay. My decision to leave that company was complicated, and because ties haven’t been cut altogether, I really shouldn’t delve into it, but as a result, I lost that incredible coverage. My next job was at a small company that could not afford to provide group insurance. (Moving to a job without group insurance was probably my first mistake.) My husband worked at the same company and was still a student. At that time, we decided to look into private insurance. We didn’t have a lot of money to spend on insurance, so we chose a plan with a large deductible through Assurant Health. The premium was still $175 or so each month with a $5,000 deductible. We tacked on maternity coverage since we planned on starting a family.

A few months later, my husband got a new job which provided group insurance. I chose not to apply for his policy at that time because we were told I would have to pay my own premium – that his employer did not cover the whole family’s premium, only his. The coverage was considerably better than our policy at Assurant, so naturally we assumed it would be too expensive.  My premium at Assurant went down to $120 a month. Midway through my pregnancy with Micah, we reconsidered (I can’t remember why – I think we planned on reorganizing our budget) and I tried to enroll with his insurance. I was denied because I was coming from a private insurance policy. Apparently I could have been added if I had applied in the first 30 days of his employment, but that was my only chance under current circumstances. I wasn’t about to get fired just to get insurance. I immediately regretted my decision to go with private insurance. Would I have been better off uninsured at that point? It’s possible but I’ll never know, I suppose. The next blow came when we added Micah to Eric’s policy and realized his paycheck stayed the same. So… we weren’t being charged extra for additional family members? Were we misinformed or did we misunderstand? I still don’t know. The third blow came when we got the bills from the hospital. Everything was charged on separate accounts, meaning the $5,000 deductible was barely met and Micah’s treatment costs were applied to a separate deductible. Some pregnancy/delivery related treatments were billed as non-maternity. Essentially, our “insurance” covered next to nothing. We racked up nearly ten grand in medical bills. I looked back on the thousands of dollars in premiums I had paid and wondered, ‘what was the point of all that?’ Nearly a year later, we still haven’t paid Micah off (though I’m hardly worried he’ll be repossessed, hehe).

Last month, my policy with Assurant was due to expire and I had the option of renewing, but at a 68% increase in premiums. Given our current financial situation, I had no choice but to not renew. Considering how much that insurance helped me, I did not mind dropping it. Especially because this past time around, I would have been better off as a self pay because I would have gotten those discounts. As it stands, I am currently uninsured. I’m not necessarily worried because I’m healthy, but we want to have more kids and can’t afford to take on any more medical bills at this point. Even if we could come up with 8-10K, if I ended up needing an emergency c-section, the bills would devastate us. I’m not sure how long it would take to recover from that. We would probably not be able to afford a third child then, and that would break my heart.

At this point, my only shot at getting insurance is through Eric either getting a new job, or his employer buying a brand new group policy with a different company (and even that is not a sure thing, I suppose). There is no way we can afford private insurance. Any plan that we can afford will end up costing us more than not having any insurance at all.

Why must affordable health insurance (that is worth anything) be tied to a job (at a larger company) and why is it so hard to get? Why are there so many exclusions? What are people like me supposed to do?

The camera was my big screen, so to speak, except nobody was telling me no, but me. I always felt compelled to spend the extra money on other things, like sending in double payments on my student loans. The longer I put it off, though, the more I realized, I am never going to buy myself this camera. One day, I will be 50 and all of my kids will be moved out. There will always be something else. I will have never bought the camera, never pursued my dream of essentially becoming my own professional photographer and filling my photo albums with beautiful memories. I will regret it.

So when we got our tax return this past month, I told my husband, “I have to buy it now or I never will.” I have to make it priority because I want to enjoy it while Micah is still a baby, while there are still so many photos to be taken. Now is the time!

So I bought a Nikon D3000. I absolutely love it. I told Eric, “I want to make out with it.” Haha. Not really. This is one of those things I will never get tired of, just like Eric still really enjoys that TV. Yeah, I could have hoarded that money, but money is not just for paying bills (extra payments, I mean, you should always pay your bills), you have to enjoy some of it, too. It’s my last hurrah before we really crack down on the debt snowball (thanks to Dave Ramsey). From here on out, we’re going to be seriously throwing everything that comes our way towards our debt. The good news is that we can be debt free (including our mortgage) in under ten years if we stick to the plan, and that is if Eric never gets a pay raise. I’d really like to see us become debt free even sooner than that. That is my big dream: to have NO debt whatsoever.

Fast forward 16 years assuming status quo on the property taxes, rent, income, etc. Who is doing better? Who made the better decision?

Here’s a little chart to keep things straight:

 

 

I did not know this 2 years ago when we bought our house. Now that we are trying to move to a new town, if we are able to sell and move, rather than take out another mortgage for another house, we plan on renting and saving up for our second home. After seeing these figures, I just can’t justify doing it any other way. Maybe getting to live in a house right now is worth paying double for some people, but I’d rather put my quarter of a million dollars towards something else. If for some reason, we cannot move, I plan on doing everything I can to send in extra payments and decrease the amount of interest we pay on this house.