We got some bad news yesterday. My husband is laid off again. He was laid off just about a year ago, so it's a little like a recurring nightmare. After last year's lay off, he got a job again really quickly, but it turned out that the company maintained it's equipment very poorly. My husband is a truck driver and if he gets pulled over in a truck that violates DOT rules, the citations he gets would come out of his own pocket and would go on his personal driving record. This would be expensive for our family and make it hard to get a job in the future. The company also did not have proper safety equipment and the work was dangerous, both long term (black lung) and short term (one of the men he worked with had bars in his leg from an on the job accident and another had been left in a tank until he had heat exhaustion). So we decided he should leave that job before something bad happened. They contested his unemployment and won.
He took a temporary job. The work was fine and paid well, but they job ended and the only other work the temp company could offer included an hour and a half commute -- not practical when the standard trucking working day is 14 hours. Finally, we decided there was no getting around it. He was going to have to drive over the road. He was home about a day and a half each week. He was living on soup and canned beans, but we were still just scraping by. We do not want to do that again. It wasn't worth it.
We were delighted when the company he had been laid off from last year called and offered him a job again. That was a little over three months ago. Then, last week, they decided to move the route around, too far for him to commute. They were kind enough not to try to screw him out of unemployment, so we have that, at least.
So here we are. Square One. Again. It's getting old. We've tried our best and the bottom just keeps falling out. We aren't entirely sure what we are going to do. We think we want to sell the Dodge Caravan. We think we can get a couple thousand for it and that will be a nice cushion. Once the last paycheck comes, I will go apply for foodstamps and whatever else we can get, including SSI for our sons.
We may take my financial aid and our tax refund in the spring and buy a small, cheap house for cash. It will be crowded with six of us, but owning something outright would reduce our expenses and provide more security. Something small would also require less energy to heat and cool. I do not know if we will be able to sell our current house. It's possible. We might have to take a few thousand less than we owe on it, but a few thousand is better than fifty thousand. We don't have to make any decisions right away.
In the meantime, I called the cell phone company to see if we could cancel any of our lines. We have five lines, but only a 550 minute plan because we really don't talk a whole lot to anyone outside of our immediate family. They took off one line and since we've been customers for quite a few years, they also gave us a $250 credit on our bill. Since I already paid this month's bill, we shouldn't have to pay another cell bill until October. I also changed our auto insurance from comprehensive to liability. Once we only have the 90-something Ford Focus on it, the bill will go down more. It's going to be a pain because the Focus only seats five and there are six of us, but other than church, it's rare that we all go anywhere together. Most of us are homebodies and the kids are now middle school and up and prefer to stay home when I'm out and about. I am going to change Netflix to just on demand next. It's only a few dollars, but a few dollars can mean having toilet paper or not having toilet paper and I'm a big fan of having toilet paper.
I'm also planning on a household stuff purge. We have a lot of books and some movies and video games that we can probably sell on Amazon.com. Need to go through kitchen stuff, furniture, clothes, shoes, etc. The cash will come in handy and it will make a move a lot easier, especially a move to a smaller place. I don't have a lot of material things I'm emotionally attached to, but one of the daughters is quite the pack rat. I warned her about the possibility of getting rid of stuff today so that she can start getting used to the idea and start thinking about which things she loves and which she can part with. The other kids have purged pretty well already because we switched everybody's bedrooms around a couple of months ago and threw a lot of stuff out in the process.
Last year, when the lay off happened, we dropped the cable and the land line, so can't really cut there. I turned the thermostats on one of the window AC units. I think my husband would notice if I turned the other one up, so I've left it alone for now. I might start clothes-pinning laundry to the fence to get out of using the dryer. We will hang on to internet access until the bitter end. We're paying $40/mo for that now and I don't think I can get it for much less than that.
When we got our tax refund in the spring, I paid for six months World of Warcraft for the guys and the funny thing is, in all of this, my twelve year old is more concerned about losing World of Warcraft than he is about losing the van or having to move to a house where he doesn't have a bedroom.
My husband is very discouraged. He has been working sixteen hour days five days a week for several weeks, so he is exhausted, as well. He does not know what he wants to do yet, but he is going to be more cautious about taking the first job he can get because last time it didn't work out well. He feels as though he was punished for trying to do the right thing, and I can't say I disagree with him.
So I guess we'll see what happens.
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