In two years from now, we should be doing much better financially.  I’ll be done with my huge car payment, done with my small car payment, done with my travel trailer payment, and (I know this sounds mean but I can’t help it) we’ll be done paying child support/boarding school for my husbands daughter from his 1st marriage.  Yeah, my step-daughter goes to boarding school, her mother claims she’s “too fat” to go to regular high school, the poor girl isn’t even fat just big boned.  Besides, just how can a kid be “too fat” to go to public school?  We are stuck paying more than half the tuition for boarding school but we only have two more years to go!

In two years my credit card debt will be much lower, I’m guessing it’ll be around $25,000.  Once I get done paying all my vehicle payments and the child support I should be able to pay off the balance in less than a year.  Then I’m going to save money for an all CASH vacation!  After struggling for years with all this debt I think it’s about time we have a little fun.

In three years when we’re debt free I plan on saving money for a kitchen remodel and new flooring.   I can’t wait to get rid of that 70’s Formica counter top of mine and my carpet has been shot for years.  I plan on ripping out all carpet, except for what’s in the bedrooms and laying down either laminate or tile.  With living out in the country with lots of farm animals, lots of animal poop, dirty feet, and muddy boots, carpet does not really work for us, I need something that’s easy to clean.

I can’t imagine what it’s going to feel like to actually have some money instead of seeing it all go out every month.

Oh and I almost forgot - I’ll finally be able to get a few miniature horses!  I think they’ll come before the kitchen remodel. 

I thought she’d settled down and was going to attend the JC, live at home so she could go to school full time and work part time.   I was wrong or she changed her mind yet again…

Yesterday she told me she thought she’d found a room to rent in a condo.  The condo was close enough to her school that she could ride her bike.  She said it was a great bargain, only $450 a month with utilities included.  She asked me if I thought she should call the woman and ask some questions.  I told her to go for it, at the time I was thinking I had just called her bluff.

So she called “Gerry” about the condo.  This is funny.  The woman told my daughter about the room and then told her that she wouldn’t be allowed any overnight guests ever and that if she wanted to have someone over for dinner she would have to give Gerry a two week notice.  The woman told my daughter that she’d be needing three references and here’s the funny part she said she didn’t want to have to talk to my daughter if she did take the room.  There would be NO chit chat!  LOL  Then she wrapped up the conversation with, “If you are a social person then this probably isn’t the room for you.”

How crazy is that?  Gerry’s rules are far more stict than mine.  My daughter is passing on that room but is still looking for another.  Less than 30 minutes later she found another “bargain” a 2 bedroom appartment that was renting for ONLY $1,095 a month!  That doesn’t sound very affordable for someone that’s already given their two week notice at work.

On Saturday night one of my 17 year old daughter’s friends was killed in a solo crash. He crashed head on into an oak tree and died instantly. I can’t imagine the heartbreak that his poor parents must be feeling. My heart goes out to them.

Its so sad how life can change in an instant and the things that seemed so important right now really aren’t anything in the big scheme of life. The only things that really matter are the relationships we have with family and friends.

Last week I was reading Blogging Away Debt, the topic was kitchen gadgets.  She got me thinking about all the kitchen gadgets I have that I don’t use and there’s a lot.  Honestly I don’t know what I was thinking when I bought half of them.

The other day while doing some grocery shopping I came across this banana slicer and it cracked me up for some reason.  Prior to my blogging and trying to payoff this mountain of  debt, I bet I would have been a sucker and bought this little gadget.  It’s priced at an unbelievably expensive $3.99!  I can just hear the “old me” thinking what a great idea this would be for the kids to use…. Like the kids ever slice bananas and even if they did what’s wrong with using a butter knife?

I hope I’m evolving into someone that knows to avoid a dumb purchase when I see it.

As many of you know, she graduated high school last week.  Now she thinks that since she has a high school diploma she deserves more than minimum wage.  I’ve tried to talk her out of quitting, she has seniority and her employers are willing to schedule her to work around HER schedule.  She doesn’t understand how valuable her employer being flexible with her hours will be to her when she starts college in the fall.

She’s been working as a “courtesy clerk” at our local grocery store for over a year and a half and her employers have only had good things to say about her yet they play the broke card and tell her they can’t afford to give her a 10 cent an hour raise.  With her working 30 hours a week the raise would cost them $3.00 a week.  With their inflated prices, they can more than afford to give her a raise but since we live in such a tiny town (less than 1,500) people, they know if she quits there will be at least 20 other kids lined up to take her job.

Now I’ll tell you another reason why I think she wants to quit.  I got her a job waitressing at a local breakfast - lunch type of restaurant on weekends, the place only has 10 indoor tables and about 6 outdoor tables, it’s tiny but really popular.  She started on Father’s Day.  The waitresses pool their tips and split them evenly since they all help each other out.  The owner ended up paying my daughter in CASH $51 for 3 hours of work… that’s $17 an hour!  Now I’m afraid she’s thinking she’s always going to make tips like that and get paid that much money.

I laid down rules when she printed out her two week notice, for the grocery store, last night.  If she doesn’t have the money for car insurance & gas, she won’t be driving, PERIOD!  She doesn’t turn 18 until the fall and I don’t plan on financing her driving, hell I can’t afford to finance her driving even if I wanted to.

This is a 5-1/2 foot snake skin! How sick is that? My husband found this skin on Thursday less than 4 feet from our front door! We know it’s not from a Rattlesnake or a King snake, we’re thinking it came from a 6 foot long gopher snake. ::shudder:: Seeing this skin makes me wonder if it had friends or family members living nearby. I guess we must have a lot of field mice and gophers to grow this snake that big. Now when I’m walking around outside, I keep my eyes on the ground. Can you imagine not paying attention and stepping on this sucker?

The kid holding the snake skin (I blurred out the face for obvious reasons) is my (very tall) 10 year old red headed daughter. I don’t think that I’ve mentioned that I had a red head before. I didn’t even have to talk her into hold the skin she was game!

Last Friday morning, I was going out to the barn to feed our steer, of course after finding the snake skin, I had my eyes on the ground. Well I found my horse tangled up in a barbed wire fence that we used as a gate and like dummies had laying on the ground - it’d been there about 3 years. She was so tangled up she was laying in the barbed wire mess. I called husband on my cell phone, he was in the house and by the time he got out to the barn the horse was freed up. We tried calling her over to us and she wouldn’t come, we eventually lured her over with some feed. My husband put her halter on her and we could see that she was cut above her hoof and was bleeding. Thankfully it wasn’t too bad. I was scared of getting hit with a huge vet bill. My husband went and bought some horse medicine to treat the wound and another to keep flies out of it. She let us treat her and was an excellent patient. She’s on the mend and we’ve learned our lesson. We rolled up the barbed wire fence and it’s no longer out there so she should be safe. I’m just luck my llama didn’t get tangled up, we’d be covered in llama spit trying to treat him.

My husband decided to take four days off of work starting last Tuesday. We had a great time just hanging out at home. Unfortunately he gets so jealous of my time with my MAC that I didn’t get online much, just a minute or two here and there. While I enjoyed my time with my husband, it sure does feel good to get back online. lol He took off this morning on a business trip and won’t be back until Thursday.

My oldest graduated high school! I’m officially old now. The graduation ceremony was perfect - not too long. I managed to get pictures of her with four of the kids she started out in Kindergarten with. Somehow I missed 3 other kids. Her whole school career I’d been thinking how cool it would be to have a “Kindergarten” shot of the graduates. Oh well, I’m lucky I got the pictures I managed to get. I’m sure this only means something to me because as a child I was constantly being moved from school to school but I’m extremely proud that I am giving all my kids the stability of staying in the same school district, they only change schools when they graduate. After graduation she went to “Sober Grad”, thats where they lock the kids up in a building and provide free games and food. She got a $25 gas card for going and won a nice camping set.

My 2nd oldest graduated from 6th grade! She was so proud of herself and looked so cute in her dress.

I’m happy schools out and I can have the kids at home with me. I really LOVE them being home.

My 12 & 10 year old girls are getting ready for 4H camp. They go next Monday and are so excited. They loved it last year and this year since they know what they are getting into are more prepared. They are already packing their clothes. I guess they didn’t get my procrastination gene?

I have my red headed niece until next Monday. Her sister went to Diabetes camp and since that camp was half way to Las Vegas, my brother and sister-in-law decided to treat themselves to a week in Vegas. I’m jealous!

I have two of my daughters graduating next week. The oldest from high school and my 2nd oldest from 6th grade. I’m thinking we’re going to be having people drop by the house even though I haven’t officially invited anyone. My house is clean right now but my porch is a mess. My free ranging chickens love to hang out on the porch and do what chickens do - poop and they poop a lot!

My goals for this weekend:
1. Clean off porch. Completed
2. Declutter livingroom and kitchen areas.
3. Finish planting vegetable garden. I still need to plant my cucumbers, swiss chard and zucchini.
4. Finish cleaning up and planting flower pots. Completed
5. Get 3 more websites up and going. Got 1 up and running, working on others.

On Tuesday I got the pink slip to my husband’s truck! What a wonderful feeling it is to know that we actually own the truck. It was funny I was talking to my husband and asked him how it felt to drive a paid for vehicle. He said, “Why don’t you take the kids to school in it and find out for yourself?” This truck is a big jacked up Ford F350 crew cab dually with a flat bed dump, the truck is 8′ wide at the rear tires. I’d need an empty parking lot just to do a U-turn. About 12 years ago he had a similar truck and I had to drive it to school because my other vehicle had a dead battery. I was so embarrassed, I was running over curbs left and right.

December 1994, I was involved in a head-on crash. I was driving on a curvy mountain road and a man who was speeding, in the USA illegally, didn’t have a drivers license, and was uninsured crossed the double yellow lines and came into my lane and hit me head on, totaling my car. I had my oldest with me, who was at the time 4 years old. We weren’t hurt too much, I had broken several bones in my foot, some broken toes and had bruises everywhere. My daughter, thankfully was fine.

My insurance company was more than generous with my car payoff. They gave me $200 more than what I had paid for my then two year old car. I really couldn’t complain.

I was wiped out for 7 months. I had developed an extremely painful bone infection in my foot and almost lost my foot. I had three surgeries (even had a morphine drip) and ended up having a “main-line” IV put in my neck that went straight to my heart. Finally seven months later, after six weeks of IV treatment my bone infection cleared up and the open wound on my foot finally healed.

Imagine my surprise when I got the call from my insurance agent saying they were going to settle with me for the maximum payout of $100,000! I was a newly married 24 year old. The most money I’d ever had prior to this was maybe $500.

So where’d all the money go? $10,000 went to my health insurance (they threatened to sue me for reimbursement of medical costs), $20,000+ went towards paying off my husband’s credit card debt, $5,000 for a backyard play system, and $5,000 for a tractor. I gave $5,000 to my mom for putting up with me and all the pain I’d been in and $1,000 to my Grandma to help her out. I also spent $200 on a D&B bag for myself. Over the years we spent another $20,000+ fighting to keep custody of my husbands daughter from his first marriage. I know another chunk of the money went towards a good down payment on a NEW (I was a sucker) Suburban. We still have a lot of that value and it’s now in my husbands truck. I’m not really sure exactly what happened to the rest of the money. I guess we piddled it away.

Look where I am now, this isn’t how my story is supposed to go. We had the best start, a better start than most people will ever get and still here we are up to our necks in debt. I wonder if I’ll ever FINALLY learn to be financially responsible?

The good news is in the next two years I’ll be paying off a vehicle and a travel trailer as well as being done paying child support for my husband’s daughter (her mother doesn’t even own a house and can’t afford to live on her own yet sends this child to boarding school and we get stuck paying for more than half).

In three years I’ll be done paying for our family vehicle.  So over the next three years I should be able to clear up $2,280 a month that I can throw at my credit card debt.

On Friday my oldest daughter was awarded an $1,100 scholarship for a JC about 35 miles away. She’s changed her mind about moving to Chico and attending a local JC there. I’m not sure if she was looking for a way to opt out of moving to Chico or not. Maybe she actually put a budget together and figured out that she can’t afford both rent and eating. Now that she’s received this scholarship she’s decided that she needs to live at home. I’m not really sure what to make of her change of plans. I’m relieved and at the same time I’m hoping her staying doesn’t have anything to do with leaving her boyfriend.

The scholarship should pay for her unit fees and all her books for a whole year. She’s pretty excited about receiving it.

Now for the bad stuff. The JC that the scholarship is good at is about 35 miles away over twisty mountain roads. It actually takes an hour to drive so she’s looking at a two hour round trip commute on school days. In the winter there are days when chains are required, there are also days when there is extremely heavy fog on the mountain. There’s also the added mileage/wear & tear to her car and of course the ever increasing cost of fuel. I’ve decided to just stay out of it and only offer my motherly advice if I’m asked. You know what they say - pick and choose your battles.

I have to admit it, I’m thrilled she’s not leaving home. The thought of her moving out, being broke all the time and taking on unnecessary debt didn’t sit well with me at all. I also feel as though she’ll have a better chance of actually getting her RN if she can go to school full time and work part time.

The new Guinea Fowl are here! We had a great hatch! Our hatch rate was 83%, this early in the egg laying season, I was thinking I’d be lucky if we got 50%. We ended up hatching 13 keets. Aren’t they cute? If all survive, I’ll end up having 18 guinea’s. They are the best guard dogs ever and they eat gophers and snakes too.

Last night my husband BBQ’d some steaks. I had bought a whole chicken on sale for $0.88/# and I had him BBQ it. I then skinned it and shredded up the meat, added some BBQ sauce and now my kids are going to have BBQ’d chicken sandwiches for the next few days. I got the buns on sale for $1 a pack. So for about $7, plus stuff I already have on hand (tortilla chips, carrots, etc.) I’ll feed all four kids for three days - that’s about $0.58 each lunch. I’m so excited and they are all thrilled to have such a great lunch!