Finances...the story of my life.

I've never been good with money. I mean, I like to think at one point I was. I remember maintaining a credit card and saving money enough to buy a car on my own with no co-signer so I must have been good at some point. But here lately I feel like every dollar I save, five more go out the window. I just don't know where I've gone wrong. Maybe if I look at the last 8 months of my life I can find some insight.

December 2016--I quit my job with Virginia Opera after 12 years of long, hard service. It was a job I loved and was getting paid pretty well...well enough to pay my rent with ONE week's worth of pay. But here in lies the rub: I started having delayed paychecks. Over and over again. And it's so hard to plan your life when you keep having your money delayed. So among other things, I left. I found a job in the great District of Columbia. But I needed to move ASAP. I pulled together as many funds as I could and moved my family in less than a week to Alexandria VA.

January 2017--So I'm working. My husband isn't. And the bills are piling up. He eventually gets a job working for Jackson-Hewitt, only temporary of course. And mostly part-time. Now we've gone from me making rent in one week of work to making 3/4 of the rent on a paycheck. Our rent, doubled. Our insurance doubled. Our bills doubled. And our income reduced by half.

March 2017--I picked up a short term gig in Atlanta to make money. However, because I didn't pay my tolls before I moved, I now have a whopping 1800 bucks in tolls to pay. I settled with the company for 1200. My pay from Atlanta--take a guess how much that was? So the trip, while it was amazing and fun, left me right back where I started.

April 2017--My husband now has a full-time job. Hallelujah. 

June 2017--I quit my new job at Studio Theatre after months of unrest and just way more drama than I wanted to deal with. I went back to Norfolk for a week to make some extra money doing lighting design gigs. Did pretty well with that. Then headed back up home to start my new job at Barbizon.

Later June 2017--Summer camp--you know that thing you need for your kids when there's no school and you have to work and you don't have any family to help take care of your kids. Up here, 200 bucks a week. So total up about 3 grand in summer camp money and well...now you're back in debt again.

Now September, I'm stuck with a feeling of helplessness. I'm doing everything I can to save a dollar. Couponing, selling, surveys, quick jobs. And why oh why do I keep coming up short? What is there left for me to do? What else can I minimize?

I just want to get to a better place financially--is that too much to ask?