Accepting the Temporary

If you follow me on twitter, you probably saw that I had some good news to share as a follow up to “Scary Stuff.”

Husband just got off of the phone with unemployment. The entire call took all of five minutes. Basically, they asked him if he was given a specific reason why he was fired and if he had ever gotten any formal warnings regarding his performance. Thank goodness for bad surprises because his shock-and-awe-dismissal from his last job basically guaranteed that we WOULD GET UNEMPLOYMENT!

Not that it’s anything to brag about.

But you seriously do not know terror until you lose your main source of income two days after getting back from a lavish honeymoon and wedding.

Having the possibility that we wouldn’t receive any assistance threw us through a major loop. We are not able to budget or make the payments to our debts with certainty. We have been holding off on buying holiday gifts for our family. And my husband’s job search has been more of a desperate plea than a strategic plan of attack.

I know that we are not out of the woods. We still are waiting on some job interview follow-ups (including one which asked for a reference check yesterday), and there are a million pending applications and resumes floating out in cyber space hopefully being analyzed right now. We are obviously not giving up or hitching our bets on the long term government assistance train.

Instead, we spend today thanking the higher powers (or the great state of Illinois) that our world provides us with opportunities to live with the “temporary.”

I may not have yet mentioned it here, but I have been practicing yoga for the last 8 years, and one of the most powerful lessons I have learned (besides how inflexible my hip joints can be) is that everything is temporary. Pain, emotion, physical, and metaphysical. Everything will move on or away eventually.  Roads that we see clearly today will be clouded tomorrow, and we’ll be left to deal with the new or unknown paths.

I’m choosing to look at this state of our house as an exercise is the temporary. Instead, we will accept what life has put in front of us knowing that time will provide some form of answer. And while I do not know for sure how we will revisit this period in the future, I hope that we can eventually look back and say “We survived. We did our best. We are ok.”

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Pay, Save, or Spend?

We’ve had some scares come up this weekend. And with unemployment looking like it’s more and more of a pipe dream… I’m not going to lie and pretend that I am not scared for what is to come. Everyone said that marriage would be hard. But really, this soon? What happened to “newly wedded bliss?”

Frankly, we’re still wading through the haze of the post-wedding blues. After 21 months of planning a totally lavish, expensive, and time consuming wedding, life hasn’t even settled down. Instead it has thrown us horrible curve balls. Despite that, we are still in the phase of “Do your remember that promiscuous bartender at the reception?” or “I will never forget our first dance…awwww.”

But I think this weekend finally snapped us out of it. We were given what will most likely be our final wedding present- a check of $200 from a relative of my Husband. My first thought was, “HELL YEAH! MONNNNNNNNNNEEEEEEYYYYYYY!!!” And then I remember that I am trying to be responsible and an adult about these things. So then I changed my tune to, “HELL YEAH! DEBT REPAYMEEEEEEEEEENNNNNNNNTTTTTTTTTTTT!”

And then we got that letter from the unemployment office in the mail.  

I’m back to the old conundrum. Knowing that our future has a good chance of falling apart at the seams- what do I do with this bit of extra income?

Do I put it towards our credit card repayment plan knowing that we may be dipping in to that emergency savings ASAP. Or, do I just put it in the savings account and be cautiously proactive? Third option- since giving Christmas gifts must be done with my family, should I use it to buy gifts?   

Part of me wants to continue on our debt pay-off track. We’re doing so well for total newbies with zero background on debt. I’ve been diligently reading blogs and following along with inspirational people on twitter. I feel like I am truly setting myself up for success and delaying our repayments is just going to hurt us in the long run.

On the other hand, I’m a total wimp when it comes to making these decisions and I often get caught up in how it’s “ok right now” without really thinking about how it’s not ok right now. We are paying over $400 towards our credit cards each month and even more on our student loans. We were essentially paying 20% of our hard earned money on paying minimum balances on cards and loans! NOT COOL!!

Now that you’ve heard me rant and go back and forth on my options, I want to know your opinion. What should I do with my extra $200? Repay some debt, fluff the emergency savings, or spend towards Christmas?

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