Day One of Blogging

Ok, here we go! I love reading blogs, especially about money, family and frugalness, so thought I'd try my hand at it.

A little background on how we got to be a one income family.  Dh was self employed in the construction industry for the past 20 odd years.  Toss in a frustrating health problem and a recession that wiped out any and all work available to him and you have a business gone down the drain.  Technically, dh has been unemployed a year now, though financially we've only felt the pinch harder the past 6 months or so. Being self employed he cannot get unemployment compensation and after spending years and thousands of dollars trying to find out what is wrong with him physically, which has the best neurologists in the country stumped, we haven't yet been able to get him on disability. I've always tried not to count too much on his income, which was always so seasonal and hard to predict from month to month.

So we live on my income, which consists of approximately $4300 per month take home pay. We have a rather large house payment ($1823) on a rather old run down house (due to a home equity loan taken out when dh was actually making some money and we didn't see the recession coming), but we have no car payments.  Seems like we should be able to do ok financially since we have no car payments, but every month seems to be a struggle.  For 2007 and 2008 I received very nice bonus's of about $12,000 each year.  The recession took that nice big perk away, so we haven't had the cushion of that for the past year.

The boy (Ds) is 18 and graduating this spring, with no plans to move out anytime soon :-).  The girl (Dd) is 14 and in junior high school.  Fortunately, my mom (my dad passed away last year) is very comfortable financially and has always said she would pay for the kids college. Thank you Mom!  Ds will be going to the nearby community college, where he has already started taking classes through a high school program. Wonderful Mom also helps subsidize us in other little ways...more on her later.

So, that's it in a nutshell.  This looks to be our lot in life for awhile so hopefully we can make it - or make do!