2013 Year in Review

It’s hard to believe it’s been a whole year since I last made a blog post.  2013 was eventful, though in hindsight it feels like it wasn’t.  Most of my personal goals for 2013 involved creating stability in my life and reducing my debt. 

I lost my cat, Ralph, in the summer of 2013.  He was a good friend, always there waiting for me when I got home and always there to see me off in the morning.  I simply wasn't prepared for how much his loss would mean to me.  He was young, it was sudden, and 6 months later I still miss him dearly.  

My two middle kids agreed to have dinner with me.  It has been more than a year since they talked to me and we have begun what I hope is the start of rebuilding our relationship.  I spent a great deal of time this year educating myself about Parental Alienation.  When it was happening to my family there was not a lot of information on the subject.  I didn’t even know that’s what it was called.  Thankfully, there are now resources on the matter.  Some studies have been done.  Awareness is growing.  Some of things I learned have helped me start building a bridge back to my children.  My oldest, however, remains distant.  I fear I did not see the warning signs of her alienation until it was too late.  So focused was I on the two who were being obviously and brutally alienated that I did not see what was happening to her.  It was a shock when she turned on me 4 years ago.  We were always very close.  She’s 21 now and her absence still leaves a whole in my life. 

Reducing my debt was a big goal for me in 2013.  One I can control.  Something I could fix.  I believe debt, especially long term debt, is a burden you bare 24/7/365.  You cannot escape it.  Borrowing money is exchanging future minutes, hours, weeks or months of your life in exchange for something you want now.  You’ll pay interest, usually a lot of it, for your impatience.  Rather than saving the money and waiting until we can pay for something ourselves, we will exchange money (money = time + effort) in order to have it now.  I didn’t always understand that.  I borrowed heavily because “that’s just what people do”.  We finance cars, we finance homes, we finance Education; TV’s, furniture, vacations and anything else we decide we simply can’t wait for.  And we spend our lives slaving away to pay the interest. 

I have a mortgage, student loans, credit cards, personal loans; I had borrowed money from my mother and my in-laws.  Much of that was related to transportation issues, but most was accumulated by fighting for my visitation rights; a decade’s worth of legal fees just so I can spend time with my children.  There was another decade of debt related to those same issues that cost me my house, my mother’s house and ended with me filing bankruptcy.  I’m a complete financial disaster.  Even so, I’d do it all again if I had to.  My kids come before my bank account and are worth way more than my credit score.  Hind sight is 20/20, however.  If I knew then what I know now, as the saying goes; I would have paid for things a little differently. 

A couple of years ago, I started looking at how to reduce my debt.  My kids are almost grown.  It was time to get things in order.  I’m a numbers guy, so I started charting my debt and calculating the interest on each of my debts.  Things get really interesting when you start sorting your debt by interest paid.  Especially when you remember that you get NOTHING in return for your interest payments.  You are literally giving that money away to a banker to pay for your impatience.  Interest Payments = Impatience Payments.  I paid off the in-laws and my mother.  I finally consolidated all my debt into my own name.  I finally owned my choices.  So 2013 was supposed to be about stability and freedom from debt. 

I currently shell out around $150 a month in Interest on my minor debts (like credit cards and personal loans).  I shell out another $150 a month in Interest for my student loan.  My mortgage is costing me another $375 a month in Interest.  That’s around $700 A MONTH in Impatience Payments.  That’s more than a whole weeks pay.  I lose more than a whole week of work every month to pay for the privilege of having borrowed money!!  Seriously.  You all should run the numbers on how much you pay in interest each month.  It’s staggering.  Our buyer / debtor society tells us “it’s ok.  Just sign here and you can have it.”  I am throwing my life to the wolves.  I am literally a slave to my impatience, dedicating a quarter of my life to pay someone for the privilege of loaning me money.  That doesn’t even count the other quarter of my life the government is taking from me.  That’s HALF of my productive life flying out the window with no real benefit to me.  At least I can do something about the quarter of my life I chose to give to someone else.  I can pay those debts and have that part of my life back. 

As I mentioned above, in the past, a good deal of my debt came from transportation issues.  I have to get to work, I need dependable transportation.  I can’t wait for a vehicle to get fixed, I don’t have another vehicle.  Most of my money over the years has gone to lawyers and court costs and child support, so I’ve never really had a dependable vehicle.  I still don’t.  But I started shopping around.  If I at least had two vehicles, I could afford to fix one and drive the other.  I had saved up some cash for this purpose.  My vehicle, a Ford Fucos (misspelled on purpose phonetically pronounced: Fu’Kus), is a piece of crap.  It does get excellent gas mileage, but has developed one of those “nobody can figure out what’s wrong with it” kinds of issues.  I set out to buy the cheapest car I could find and I really didn’t want to borrow any money to get it.  As luck would have it, I found Sebring Convertible.  It was seriously the cheapest car I could find.  It has some issues, but nothing I can’t fix.  So, I parked the Fucos and drove the convertible all summer.  I kept tinkering with the Ford until I finally got it drivable.  I then had two vehicles at my disposal.  No longer would I be forced to sell my broken down car for very little return and then rush out and buy another car just so I could get to work. 

My debt reduction plan was going well.  So well, in fact, that when I heard there was a 4x4 truck for sale for only $1500 I thought I could extend my transportation stability.  I had the money saved back, winter was coming and having a truck would be nice as I tend to do a lot of home repairs.  Buying the truck would set back my debt reduction a bit, but not so much as to lose ground or anything.  I made the decision to buy it.  It needed some work; I sank maybe another $600 into it and had it running pretty well.  In fact, it was really nice to have a car to drive while I was fixing up the truck.  My transportation stability was coming along nicely and I had managed it without going further into debt. 

Then the bugs came.  If you have never had to deal with Bed Bugs, be grateful.  It’s a terrible infestation to get.  So bad was our infestation that the chemicals Terminix was using had little to no effect.  We had to remove everything cloth from our home, run it through industrial dryers (by the truck load) while they sprayed chemicals all over our house.  I took days off work just to prep the house for their treatment.  They treated our house 3 times and barely made a dent in the number of bugs we were seeing.  The kids were all sleeping in one room, two of them on the floor because we had to throw their mattresses away.  I ripped out the carpet.  We threw away things by the truckload, - literally.  I took 4 truckloads to the dump.  Still the bugs persisted.  We were doing load after load after load of laundry.  We tried everything we could find on treatment for these little bastards and they just kept coming. 

After $1800 and 6 weeks of no results I fired Terminix.  I am still seeking a refund from them.  I found a local company (Indy Bed Bug Pros) that does a heat treatment.  The bugs die at 120 degrees.  They run your house up to about 140 degrees for several hours.  That was another $2000.  At least it seems to have worked.  For now, we appear to be bug free.  (If you get these things – do the heat treatment, chemicals don’t really work)

I estimate the bugs have cost me over $5000.  It has completely negated all of the progress I made in 2013.  The truck blew a head gasket after we got it all fixed up.  I couldn’t even use it during the huge snow storm we just had.  I still miss Ralph (my cat) every single day.  So, 2013 seems like a wash, maybe even a bust. 

But it’s easy to focus on the negative, especially when Ralph isn’t there to cheer me up.  But the fact is, I was able to handle the bug thing without borrowing money from friends or family.  Sure, I had to use the credit cards I had just paid off, but I WAS able to cover it.  That’s light years ahead of where I was.  Sure the truck blew a gasket, but it IS fixable and I have a car to drive in mean time.  Again, that’s light years ahead of where I was.  I keep reminding myself to look at the lowest common denominator.  I have provided for myself and my family.  We have food, shelter and clothing.  For that I AM grateful.  I reconnected with two of my kids this year.  I AM happy about that.  Two steps forward and one step back is still progress.  It is my own expectations that have caused my disappointment.  It’s time to adjust them.  It’s time to set new goals for 2014 (which are basically the same goals I had for 2013).