No More Band-aids: Part Two

You have to recognize a problem in order to fix it.

Our problem is that we pay 40% of our gross income towards housing.  We should be paying about 25% of our gross income towards housing. 

Our problem is that in order to afford to be comfortable we shouldn't really be paying more than $1000 per month on housing.

We pay close to $1600 a month for our mortgage.

That's a big problem.  I can sew all night long and get a ton of Etsy sales but it won't make up the difference and to do that much extra work on top of my nearly full time headline editing job is not going to make my life better.  Working harder to pay for something I can't afford isn't a good solution.

That's like a Walmart employee trying to finance a Porche. 

The question we should all know the answer to in our life is this: What Are My Priorities?


This week, after a lot of effort trying to come up with answers that avoided the main problem, I finally faced it head on and the truth is this:


When it comes down to it, having a garden is not the most important thing in my life.  Having chickens is not as important to me as having more time to spend with my kid.  Spending time with my kid and not always having most of my brain engaged in the stressful question of how we'll survive...is something my  kid deserves.  I can't even tell you when was the last time I hung out with Max and wasn't preoccupied the whole time with my enormous stress. 

People keep telling me to enjoy my life in spite of money troubles because there will always be money to worry about.  I find this advice inadequate and wrong.  For people living mostly within their means this may be true.  When you are living way out of your means it is useless advice.  There is absolutely no off-button for stress when you can't even afford the basics and your whole life of being 3 years behind in paying taxes stretches out in front of you full of penalties and accruing interest. 

It is also stupid (I'm sorry) to suggest to a person with clinical anxiety to simply enjoy life in spite of it's stresses.  Not everyone can know when they're dispensing advice to someone who has clinical levels of stress, but anyone who knows me knows I have GAD and such advice borders on mean or willful ignorance.  Or a disbelief that mental illness is something out of one's control.  All of which are unhelpful and sometimes hurtful.

Solid solutions are much easier to devise once you are honest about the problem you are facing as well as what your true priorities are.

When I said my priorities out loud to myself everything became a lot simpler.  Once I stripped away my stubborn wish not to have to start over or change direction, once I let go of my obstinate hope that somehow our prospects will change soon and this house will not be the big problem, everything became clear.

There is one option left for us as far as staying in this house is concerned.  There is a government program to help people like us called Home Affordable Modification.  Our bank is participating in this program which means that we can apply.  Wells Fargo is notorious, however, for being difficult to work with.  We already know this from trying to work with them prior to going bankrupt.  I did some reading and it seems that it takes anywhere between 3 months to 17 months to negotiate a modification with them, about a truckload of paperwork, and the awesome possibility that they will refuse your request after all that hoop jumping.

We spent the better part of last year dealing with truckloads of paperwork, horrible horrible tallying of debts and learning the legal side of bankruptcy hoping that at the end of it all we would be deeply relieved and be able to stay in our house and live happily ever after with crushed credit and the shame of financial failure emblazoned on our foreheads.  The thought of going through a similarly scouring paper-heavy shaming process sounds a lot like my idea of hell on earth.  I would rather blow up a thousand helium balloons and have to sit in the middle of them while watching a horrible mime MIMING than go through this.

Philip is going to take on the paperwork.

A plan has been laid out.  I will not share the explicit details here.  It is not my desire that anyone else chime in on how we should solve our problem.  Our bankruptcy lawyer has been called and hopefully tomorrow we'll have an answer we need in order to completely chart our course with the least amount of damage.

What it boils down to is that if the bank won't negotiate our loan, or if they won't bring the price down to where we can actually afford it, we will walk from the house and rent something we can afford.

This week I let go of all the things I used to think were important enough to fight for.  This week I looked at the green elephant in the room.  I asked myself what is really important and I answered with complete clarity.  I love this house but not enough for it to swallow me whole and steal from my son all my attention and steal from me what little writing ambition I have left.

To be honest, I really enjoyed imagining being free of home ownership; imagining a future in which I'm not working 70 hours a week.  The thought of living a life I can actually afford made me about a hundred pounds lighter than I was when I was avoiding the obvious.

Maybe it wouldn't be so horrible to rent an apartment.  Maybe we could rent one of the old ones downtown.  If we paid between $700 and $1000 for rent, with all the responsibilities and costs inherent in home ownership lifted from our shoulders we would not only be able to afford to save every month to pay our taxes, we could save to take a family vacation.  We might actually be able to afford some health insurance for Max.  We'd be able to keep our pets up to date on their vet visits.  We could all get dentistry done every once in a while to stave off the seemingly inevitable tooth loss which Oregonians suffer from at nearly all income levels, but most notably ours.*

So the future is just as uncertain as it's always been for us.  Settling in, putting down roots, seeing fruit trees mature are all nice things but the reality is that it most likely isn't going to be our story. 

In my desire to strip my life down to only the important things I have considered a lot of other details too.  Blogging and being online a lot is an emotional drain.  Sometimes is buoys me up with support from people here. Chatting with old friends on Facebook I otherwise wouldn't be in touch with can be great at times and at others I think that people drift for a reason and none of us were important enough to each other to keep in touch with when it wasn't so easy which makes our contact now fairly meaningless and shallow.  Often I am irritated by so much contact with people.  I put myself out there and just as often as I'm encouraged and uplifted I'm nitpicked and criticized which is wearing.  So I also imagined a life with very little online presence.  A life in which I cultivate the positive relationships I have in my every day life and cut off constant access to me by people I don't want in my life who inevitably find their way to me on Facebook.

Simplifying. 

I don't know if I'll keep blogging into infinity or not.  If I no longer have a garden and chickens and a house I may not care to be building Stitch and Boots, and anyway, any time you present informational content someone out there is eager to correct and to argue and make you wrong.  I don't know that I want to have that relationship with human beings.  Perhaps the time is coming to journal privately again.  Pose my questions and my philosophical explorations to myself without allowing others to dive in and take me literally and constantly feel like they need to solve my every problem and answer my every question which is often simply part of my mental and emotional journey and not a plea for help or interference.  The time may be coming to let go of all the things that serve to complicate my hours.  I don't know.  I've come to the point of quitting many times and then not had the guts to do it. 

As soon as I can, I will close down the Etsy shop too.  As soon as my trip to New York has been tied up and squared away.  I appreciate all the support I've gotten in sales, because it's been helpful, but the minute I am able to I will shut down shop and only sew for myself because it isn't my dream to sew for people and all it is is another job that takes up all my time and doesn't pay the bills adequately enough.

I used to think owning a home was the pinnacle of life fulfillment.  Back when I got to stay home with my kid and didn't have to work to help pay the mortgage and I actually had time to spend enjoying my garden and my kitchen and making curtains for the windows and cleaning and cutting flowers for my dining room table it felt like the best thing in the world.  I haven't lived that life for four years now and I am finally facing the probability that I will never have that life again.

I want to be able to afford paying my bills again so that when I'm done working my hours for pay I can stop thinking about working for pay and enjoy quality time with my family.  I miss playing with Max.  I miss having undivided attention to share with him.  I see him growing and maturing and for the last four years I have had the constant preoccupation of work and how to make enough money.  Four years of my  kid's life wasted on incessant and painful stress.  Because I was trying to live a life that I am no longer meant to be living.  It isn't just about me and my kid, it's about all of us as a family. We love our tight little group of three but how often do we get to spend time together where we completely let go of all our other concerns?  We should be doing something fun together (like romp in the woods) every single weekend.  I want that! 

And finally, this past summer I found my way into the writing I always believed I was meant to do but which had previously eluded my efforts my whole life.  I know that now is the time for me to write books.  For some writers the time comes early and for others it doesn't come until middle age.  More than any other writing I need to be writing books.

That's what I want.

So if any of you are in similar situations, I have one piece of advice for you:

Ask yourself what your 3 top priorities are.

When you have honestly answered that question you will be able to come up with appropriate solutions.  And by appropriate I don't mean easy.  I mean that the chaff will blow away and a path will present itself.    Your answer for yourself might be much different than mine, and that's how it should be.  I can't tell you what decisions to make or how to fix your biggest problems.  I can only tell you that you can't come up with the right solution if you don't even recognize the real problem and are willing to address it directly. 

If you cut your artery on life you'll find that band-aids are inadequate and will cause you to bleed out. 







*Oregonians, on the whole, don't seem to care about their teeth much.  While rich people here are largely dentured, the same income levels in California seem to keep more of their original teeth.  I was beginning to feel that losing my teeth, always a big concern of mine, was going to happen sooner than later.  I really desperately want to be able to afford some dental work.