Moving On

Christmas vacation is over! The kids are back in school today. I enjoyed having them home with me the last two weeks and I am kind of sad. Everyone's adjusting back to going to bed early and waking up early. Somewhat reluctantly, on all our parts, I might add.

Things are coming along in all the other areas of life. Financial Peace University starts tomorrow. I picked up our kit yesterday and I'm really looking forward to it. We have something of a working budget hammered out for now. We're so far behind on the house that for now we've decided we're not paying the mortgage. We are in communications with the mortgage company and have tried several angles to get assistance, to no avail. Right now what we will probably do is wait until they start foreclosure proceedings and then see if we can turn it into a short sale. That will, hopefully, buy us the time we'll need to get everything together to move somewhere else.

"Somewhere else" is looking like it'll probably be North Carolina. I'm open to it and OJ is really interested. We love Boone but employment opportunities are slim... so it'll probably be either Raleigh or Charlotte. He has friends in both cities, and I have a cousin in Raleigh.

On our radar is also Austin, Texas. We have friends there, and OJ's brother lives there. Neither of us have ever been though, and OJ is really not keen on how hot it gets (whereas I LOVE it!).

(And of course, lest we forget, we're probably going to spend about a year in Park City, Utah after I win my beloved HGTV Dream Home.)

It is our hope to visit all of the places on our list sometime this year so we can truly decide on our favorite and start looking for work. And of course, despite which one ends up being the 'favorite', it'll really depend on jobs. OJ's going to try to get a job and stay with friends while he finds us a place to live, I think. We'll just have to see how it all plays out.

I'm still working on the house. Getting lots of stuff purged. Which reminds me, I have a trunk full of stuff I need to bring to Kara, the lady that sells my stuff on ebay. She does an awesome job! She has an ebay store and does online consignment for several people, so she always has a nice variety of merchandise. If anyone is in need of stuff, and wants to help out me, or her, or any of the rest of us local moms that need money, you can find her store here: The Sweet Buy And Buy.

I've also started working on my health a bit more. I had stopped taking everything but the absolute necessary medications while I was having all my stomach trouble last year, and while that hasn't completely cleared up (the endoscopy showed nothing but some inflammation, biopsies of which gave us no information), we're chalking it up to stress/anxiety pain and acid reflux. So I'm easing my way back into my other medicines and vitamins, starting with my metformin, which is causing a little bit of stomach upset but is also bringing my blood sugar down to more acceptable levels, so yay. I'll do most of my health and weight loss blogging over at my blog, The Big Fat Breakup, if anyone wants to follow along.

one of my favorite recent pins. Are you on Pinterest yet? Follow me!

Financial Peace

I've always been a fan of Dave Ramsey, but I've never really put effort into following his ideas... or much of any ideas about finances, really. I'd dabble in fixing our finances but never really committed for more than a short while. Good intentions, bad follow-through. After reading about a friend's experience with Dave's Financial Peace University (and her recent encouragement to check out one of the local FPU classes that will be starting soon), I convinced OJ that we should take the class. It's $100, not very much to spend on one's financial future. I think taking it together, spending dedicated time for 12 weeks talking about our finances and ways to make things better, working together and finally building a solid partnered financial foundation in our marriage, is a good idea.

OJ is skeptical about the fact that it is a Christian-based program and that it is held at a church. He's become very atheist over the past year or two. I told him there was no way I was entertaining the idea of moving to the Bible Belt (North Carolina) with him if he wouldn't even take a class because it was held at a church. I'm sure we can filter out any God messages and apply them in our own spiritual / ethical / moral way. He also doesn't love the idea of paying someone (AKA making THEM rich) to give us 'financial peace', but I maintain that people's time and efforts are worth paying for if we learn something / get value from it. AND, as I said, $100 is not that much for two people to invest in a 12-week class.

I don't know which class we will be taking yet; I have sent an email to the most likely one with some questions. Hopefully we'll be able to start soon.

I wonder if there's a way to take these methods and convert them in such a way that they could be applicable to weight loss and clutter management. I could become the next guru of fixing up your life!

Daydreaming

Wow, I haven't posted since March? AMAZING. I post other places... I guess I just haven't been sure what I'm doing with this blog.

I'm daydreaming right now. I suppose it's only fitting I felt the pull to post on my million dreams blog when I'm daydreaming about things I want / want to do.

I want...

a beautiful vacation cabin in the mountains of North Carolina so my family can spend chunks of time playing in the wilderness together (and then we can rent it out during the times we aren't there)

a decluttered house with all this stuff finally sold and out the door (there's a LOT to go through still... this is no short task... and so I dream of it just being DONE already)

living a life with enough money to make ends meet AND having all our debts paid, living credit card free

being a foster parent (I just discovered the fairly new, yet entirely awesome, blog Backwoods Mom... reading through her blog isn't helping me quench my desire to be a foster mom OR live in the wilderness)


Having a million dreams is hard because I often don't know what I want to do for a living. I'm happy doing so many things it's hard to focus on one; it's hard not to get swept up in the excitement of a new idea (or the rekindling of an old idea that's been loved and shelved for a while). Even thinking about "what would I do if I was rich?" doesn't help, because I think if I had the money I'd do ALL these things. I'd raise billions of kids and spend lots of time being an awesome mommy but I'd still start up Spookytown, I'd just have the money to hire people to work in the businesses I started there rather than having to build it from the ground up...
I'd also own rental properties and vacation properties all over the place, and would rent out the vacation properties when we weren't using them, and would spend lots of time traveling from spot to spot.

Sometimes I wonder if I should focus on one VS the other (family's not optional; it's coming along with the ride. The only question is how BIG we let the family get, I guess), or if I should keep trying to have both. They're certainly not mutually exclusive but splitting our attention and goals means everything grows a bit slower. The spooky side VS the vacation side. And of course, since I'm NOT rich, building the spooky side is going to involve a whole lot of blood, sweat and tears from us, which means that we will have a lot less time to go on vacations for a while and will be paying a lot more in vacation property management fees once we start accumulating said property.

And since we don't have the money to buy ANY properties right now, what do I do for money in the meantime? How much of myself do I want to invest in working VS spending time with my family?
I decided recently to start selling Pure Romance (click the link to visit my personal Pure Romance by Kristi website if you're interested). I believe I can work that business part time and make the money we need while still being able to focus on my family. I believe I will ENJOY that business too, which is very important to me.

Sometimes I worry I'm going to enjoy it so much that it'll become a full time thing for me and I will find myself putting my spookytown dreams on hold to pursue this career.

Then I laugh and say to myself, oh, what a TERRIBLE dilemma to have, having to choose between two things you'd love to do.

Life's funny that way sometimes. You think you're going to open a haunted bar, only to find yourself selling sex toys from a mountain cabin several states away.