These are the Saturdays of our lives...

Saturday, Aug 2, mid-summer, you might say.
Looking back on this time last year I find that we're in sort of a bizarro version of the same situation. Bizarro in that so many things are reversed or queered in relation to my (and our) state exactly one year ago.

For instance, I am in the dead midst of the delivery of the biggest project I've worked on at work this year, and let me tell you, I'm totally changing the way we carry out some very important aspects of our IT. Not only that, I'm putting in place a framework that will just as drastically change (and improve) how we carry out a whole other side of how we do what we do. I am on the top and everyone seems to be waiting with great anticipation to see how this young (I'm still young!) guy who showed up last year and started changing things around is going to once again totally change the game in a way that will make life better for everyone. Pretentious? Moi? No, seriously. You might think that how a computer gets from box to desk isn't all that important in the grand scheme of things, but if you're one of the people who has to move that computer from box to desk and deal with people who are getting the computer, then how easy and how fast makes all the difference in the world. Not only that, but my company is not some monstrosity like Target that has money falling out its ass. Budgets are really important and the fact that I'm probably going to bring things from A to B for way less money than it has ever cost is a pretty big deal.

So, the second side of the bizarro factor (totally heavily awesomely employed vs. unemployed) is that though I'm on a super steep climb to greatness, I'm even worse off financially now than I was last year at this time and all my hard work will not pay off in dollars and cents for almost a whole year. So I go from being unemployed with an uncertain near future and a nice big financial cushion to being well employed, amazingly bright future, and suffering from nearly crushing financial burdens. I've never made more and I've never been worse off, all at the same time. It boggles the mind.

How did we get here?
Well, since this time last year the cushion has been steadily depleted due to the house not selling. It remains not sold. It is now being rented, essentially as my favorite charity since I still have to spend hundreds and, hopefully for only the first months as a rental, thousands of dollars on the house every month. So, while I have renters to help reduce the amount of mortgage I'm paying, I am still paying a mortgage, and for the past few months it has been the full mortgage, plus bills. So, there will be no more bills, but the mortgage is still there and the renters aren't paying for all of it. After the property management company takes its cut (about $100), what we get in rent covers about 2/3 of the mortgage, which has also recently gone up to cover the increased cost of insurance due to us needing rental insurance instead of regular home owners insurance. So there's that. Any savings we may have had are gone into the house already. On top of that, as I've mentioned, there's the extra moneyy we need to pay off the city to allow us to actually convert to a rental property, which is an additional $1000. And our rent on our apartment went up. Luckily I was able to negotiate $50 increase instead of the $150 that our landlord originally proposed, so that shouldn't seem like a huge hit, but it all adds up.
Gee, that doesn't sound like we should be all THAT bad off, right? I mean, its not like we own a car and have been pouring our paychecks into the gas tank, right? Wrong. I don;t know whats going on in the rest of the country, but everything here is getting more expensive due to the gas situation or attempts to cope with it. Milk is $5 a half gallon. Most food items have gone up in price 10 to 50 cents. Doesn't sound like much, but it all adds up. When we moved here, we spent about $60 at the farmers market and then another $40-60 at the grocery store every week. Now the farmers market trips average about $100 and grocery store is more like $60-80. That adds up quick. Anyone who has their eyes open these days is getting intimately familiar with the feeling of being "nickle and dimed to death." Its for real. It sucks.

STILL, why are things seeming to get worse? Well, its all back to the house. See, the biggest bill for the first half of the year was the rent bill, which came out of one paycheck. The mortgage and house bills were being paid out of my old 401K dispersal. So the first paycheck would cover rent and necessities like child care, groceries, etc. Then the second paycheck would pay the local bills and necessities for those two weeks. And the wonderful thing was, the second paycheck would usually not be depleted by the time the next one rolled around, so that would help make life feel a bit more comfortable. Well, for several months the first paycheck goes to rent and such, then the second paycheck goes to mortgage and such. Up until maybe three months ago we'd managed to pull money out of several magical places. The tax refund paid for most of the mortgage one month, then the economic stimulus package paid for it the next, then a huge refund from the gas company (because no gas was being used all winter while my house froze and burst all my pipes) paid for more than half of a mortgage payment. Over the past year Andrea had saved up enough money to basically split rent/mortgage with me (she'd pay rent and I'd pay mortgage) I think twice, which also helped a lot. But we finally reached the point when we'd run out of places to pull money from. All along we've been doing the same sort of financial balancing act, like a shell game in some ways, that by all rights we really shouldn't have had to do had things just gone a little bit differently.

Anyone who knows the story of our whirlwind move to NY knows that the only thing that was missing from our fairy tale was this one loose thread, the house that had not sold yet. And that thread just kept getting yanked and pulled until it feels like the whole tapestry is unraveling. The job that was supposed to be the big opportunity turned out to be a frog in a prince's disguise. The assumptions that influenced our initial decisions were turned invalid and hence we find our fairy tale, though full of wonderfully bright and amazing plot points, turning more towards something of the Brothers Grimm.

The hope is that this month is the pivot. We will get our first full injection of rental income (though I'm still afraid that amount will be less than expected due to "property management" costs that are deemed too trivial to require authorization). Last month was specifically grueling due to the ways that the days fell on the calendar which had me getting my first paycheck early in the month (10th) and the second on the 28th, which enclosed a 3 week stretch between them, each of which required purchase of groceries and payments for the nanny. I've checked my calendar for the next time that the paydays fall in that sort of pattern, which is October, so that hopefully I can be better prepared. But the hope is that the mortgage will hurt less this month, so that second paycheck will stretch longer and help provide some more room to move at the beginning of the next month, and so on and so on, until we are back into a more stable cycle. We're trying to stay positive and support eachother, but we're all under a lot of stress so sometimes it can be hard. Add to that the other every day stresses and some days seem like they're not even worth getting up for. Of course, Felix doesn't let anyone sleep in much, and seeing his smiling face is more than enough to make any one of us get up and charge into the day no matter what. But I'd be lying if I said we don't discuss the pros and cons of making another big change, calling it quits and moving back to the midwest, back to our house, back to our old lives, or whatever semblance of them we can recreate there. Since we've signed our tenants up for a 1 year lease and we've just renewed our own, we're rather committed to at least one more year here. We have decided that we will give it our all and make it work, and if things haven't improved, then maybe we will come back to the middle west. Maybe we'll take it by storm, maybe we'll slink in under the cover of night. Maybe we'll be in yet a whole new place one year from now: moved to a nicer apartment or put a down payment on a brownstone, start up a design studio, gone into consultancy, making a million bucks...who knows. For the next couple weeks, it still feels like we're in the bottom of a well. But maybe we'll see the sun soon enough.
Stay tuned.