Winter where I live in the Northeast can be brutal. Nor’easters with multiple feet of snow being dropped in a matter of hours is just not my thing to drive home in. I did however accept the pizza making job that is on the way home at night. Tonight is actually the first night I will do it. I feel extremely comfortable with it and I am kinda looking forward to it. Since I make pizza at home it is a natural fit. It will be interesting to see how it goes tonight and what I will need to learn. During the interview I saw many things that I thought were odd given my previous experiences in a few different pizza places. This place just opened last month so I am sure they are just working the kinks out.

Here is to the reboot of the plasectomy employment; day 1.

I applied at several places and heard back from a large big box home improvement store and a different pizza place than the one I had worked at several months back. I have gone through two interviews with the store and my third will be tomorrow with the store manager. It is your standard cashier position to make some extra money. I would leave work and travel 15-20 minutes farther away from my home to get there after work and then drive back about 40 minutes home at night and on the weekend.

The other possible position I found on craigslist.org, would be making pizzas, not delivering them. Delivery can be lucrative and while I enjoyed the position in college, I wasn’t making enough money at it to justify the wear and tear of my vehicle. I enjoy making pizzas at home and I hope that I can retain some of that joy if and when it becomes a job. The other bonus is that it is on the way home at night and it is within 15-20 minutes of my home. My only real concern of this place is that it is a new establishment. I mean NEW, in the past few months new and that scares me a bit. However, I did interview with them on Tuesday night at the dinner hour and they had me making pizzas that they were serving customers for my interview. It was busy then and in the course of 30 minutes I had made 4 pizzas while the other guy made a few as well. That was a good sign. I did well and they asked for my availability and a reference.

About getting the second job…..It’s odd because I know I need the position to get a bigger shovel for my debt snowball, but I don’t really want to do it and quite honestly who really wants to work a second job? Maybe it’s the fact that I now have two possible options for a second job in front of me and I keep telling myself to take both if offered and work your butt off. Then, I think of my family, the kids at ages 6, 4, 2, and I would literally being working ALL the time. No life.

The price I pay for being stupid.

The second job since quitting the pizza delivery job never panned out. UPS never called. The dream of keeping a somewhat normal schedule looks like it will be broken. I followed up with UPS in late October and was told I would hear something the first or second week of November, that call never came. It is now mid-November and I feel confident in saying that by now they would have their seasonal positions filled. When I met with them for a tour of the facility there was 8 of us and 1 position open. The odds were stacked against me.

This had left me to move on and seek other employment elsewhere. I am trying for a job at a big box home improvement store using some networking of a person I know there. Hopefully that will pan out since they have some open positions. I would think that would easily add a few hundred to the plasectomy busting.

Oh, also this month we re-worked our budget and for the first time really went cash only. It feels weird and seems to work. More on that later.

I really feel like all I am doing is dragging my feet on the 2nd job. I want out of this situation, a little bit of air to breathe, but I feel so beaten down by weight of it that I am depressed. It’s paycheck to paycheck these days and I can’t take it.

There I said my peace and I can feel the fire again start to burn for the plasectomy. I really should cut those cards up, but what if I need them to balance transfer from one card to another? Eek!

I was having migraines for the first time of my life that affected my vision. It was scary as I had never had a migraine before and never associated a migraine before with temporary vision loss/blind spots in one eye. It was a scary thing to suddenly not be able to focus, read, and then to have shimmering lights in your field of vision. They lasted about 30 minutes and then at the end I would have a massive pounding headache for hours with little relief from ibuprofen or Tylenol. I saw a doctor about and apparently I am a prime candidate to start developing migraines at my age, whatever that means.

I don’t know if it was the stress of the plasectomy and the intensity, or if it was just a fluke. The doctor said that the lack of sleep, stress, certain foods can also trigger a migraine. I have a pretty good idea on what caused it. I used to be a heavy diet soda drinker up until a little over a year ago, I loved it. If the soda had to come from a bottle or can it would have been Diet Mountain Dew. However, if it were a fountain drink, it didn’t matter; Diet Pepsi, Diet Coke, Diet Mountain Dew, etc. I loved them all. I picked up drinking soda again when I started delivering pizza again, a big liter of Diet Pepsi straight from the fountain machine twice during a shift and then it poured (pun intended) over to the home. 2 liter bottles of Diet Mountain Dew gone within two days. This I believe led me to have three migraines within the month of May. I stopped drinking soda on May 28th after some research of what was going on before I saw the doctor, knock on wood, I haven’t had another since.

So here is to moving on with the plasectomy and focusing in and living life.

I changed companies seven months ago and I am now learning what it is like during their year end business cycle. You see, they follow the calendar year of schools and universities from July to June of the following year. Which means for me all the business that can be placed on the books creates for a very hectic late May all the way through the end of June. Which is great because I like to be busy as it passes the time by just fine and before you know it it is time to go home.

Fortunately or unfortunately depending how you look at it one of my coworkers gave notice a little over two weeks ago and their last day was on Wednesday of last week. Sad to see them go, but this creates a whole world of opportunity for overtime for me especially now at the end of the fiscal year. My coworker will not be replaced because of the economy.

Hopefully I can take advantage of this and really reap in the rewards of overtime and bang out more of the plasectomy.

How do I fight it? I look back and see how much ground we have made. We have come so far in such a short amount of time. Sacrifices have been made, possessions sold, and simpler living has come our way. Forget about blow money, we blow it before we get it based on our budget. Our budget has seriously taken a backseat as of late, pretty much non-existent since starting this second job. Our bills are being paid, but anything left over does not get allotted to where it needs to be. Something always seems to come up that wasn’t planned for or goes over the budgeted allotment.

I had to replace the fluorescent lights in our kitchen recently and they are the not the inexpensive 4ft shop lights or the small bulbs that are in your standard lamp. These are the U-shaped bulbs that cost $12.99 a piece. I replaced one and all was well for a few days, then it began to flicker and would not turn on. I removed the housing and noticed the bulb that I had not replaced was dark around the ends and decided to replace it. $25 spent, not accounted for in a budget. A vet visit, eating out, a run to the store for X,Y,Z. Ugh

The month is still young and it is time to get back on track. Back to the plasectomy and a budgeted life.

How did we do this?
Well, tax season and the accompanying refund has come and gone and that helped out tremendously, a $5,000 refund. The other amount came from cashing out my measly 401k from my previous employer when the market was at 9k. Stupid idea, I know, but the pressure of the debt and a few hundred dollars in a budget shortfall every month left me with little choice. I stressed in agony over that decision for months until I finally bit the bullet and just did it. I am fully aware of the future ramifications of that decision and there is no point in looking back and regretting it now. After the federal and state government withheld its supposed right to take my money, I walked away with another $5,000 to apply to the credit cards. To top it off the other $1,200, well that was selling few things around the house and the minimum payments a month.

I am extremely proud of this accomplishment and I know that if all goes well with the selling of our extra vehicle (hopefully soon) and my new second job that we can bust out the remaining credit card debt within a matter of months. It will nice to know that the amount of bills that were coming in will only be a few instead of the mountain it once was. Trying to juggle several credit card payments was a huge mess and a huge burden to bear.

What are your accomplishments so far this year? A quarter of the year is gone, how are you doing and what are your plans for the remainder?

Why does it seem that when you are faced with a two and half week time frame between paychecks the earth stands still? I honestly thought that this coming Wednesday was April 1st and I would be getting paid. I guess I am playing a pre-April fools day prank on myself and a mean one at that. This next week and a half is going to be a true show of determination and will power to stay within the budget and avoid plastic like the plague. I can feel my weakness coming on stronger than ever and having a relapse against my plasectomy.

Our cash has been divided up into the correct categories, grocery money spent, blow money gone, entertained by entertainment, and the vehicles have had their gas thirst quenched. Maybe it’s the idea that I know my bank account is at $0.00, the first time in a long LONG time it has ever been there. It is a very unsettling feeling to know that there is NO money. Thankfully we have our emergency fund so that if something truly does happen we are covered.

8 days and counting….I hate Mondays.

In our home we follow a zero dollar based budget, something we have never done until the start of this year. I have detailed in the past how this is going for us and it continues to get better. The first month there were fights over the money and where it should go, extremely stressful. The second month, less stress and we worked through it, but rocky still. This month it did take us a couple of days to complete the entire month, have the plan for our money and we still fell a little short of funds. The shortage is being resolved by selling items on a large auction site and free classified ads. This has helped us out and gave a much needed “phew, we made it.” Of course when next month rolls around we will probably be in the same situation.

One of the tools we use is the online gazelle budgeting software available from the Total Money Makeover website. We had received a 30 day free trial during a promotional period from purchasing one of the Dave Ramsey products and gave the tool a try. It has a very clean, easy wizard approach to help creating that first budget and maintaining it. There is also a lite version of the gazelle budget software available here to try out which works as well, but lacks the wizard walk through and the breakdown of your payees. It does cost to be member of the Total Money Makeover website at $9.95 a month to get the complete online budget software and it may be of value to you. The membership does also include access to podcasts of his radio show, community forums, but I mainly use it for the software at the moment. I really like that I can access it at home, work or any location with internet access if need be. However, at $10 a month that money may be better suited for my plasectomy so I have started to use a free alternative that I like very much and considering moving to entirely.

A superb free option to the online software is available from the Enemy of Debt website and can be found here. They were extremely generous in offering this tool free as it very well laid out, direct and easy to use. If you are familiar with the Dave Ramsey plan or simply need a FANTASTIC zero dollar based spreadsheet I highly recommend the one over at Enemy Of Debt. It auto calculates, gives percentages of your income in each category, and has a tab for the lump sum saving that needs to be done throughout the year for items such as furniture, Christmas shopping, saving for auto repair, home repair, etc.

Try it and let me know what you think or what you are currently using.