On vacation
I will be on vacation with my wife’s family for the next week so don’t expect any blog posts (unless, of course, they have high speed internet in the hotel room in which case you can pray that my wife doesn’t kill me).
A lazy bunny and a pretty wife
She also likes to guard her “rock”:
My wife and I went to Taipei, Taiwan for the Computex electronics tradeshow in June. A supplier took us to a Buddhist temple. Here is a picture of us outside of it:
Hard times - at least they can’t eat us
My wife and I have had some hard times lately - things were going really great up until a couple of months ago - then my foot started hurting me. We had been training for the St. George Marathon, so I just figured that I had overdone it and I should take it easy for a few days.
Tip: Get good insurance
It turns out that I had MRSA, which is a methycilline-resistant staph infection (translation - staph infection that won’t go away with normal medicines). So I had to go to the emergency room, have surgery and stay in the hospital for a week. Then I had a line put in my arm that went to my heart and I had to drive to the hospital twice a day for IV therapy, which lasted 2 hours. Apparently, the insurance plan that I had chosen (Mega Life, underwritten by Beech Street) had a $3K surgery deductible along with a million exclusions, leaving my total liability about $10K on a $30K bill.
So here is my tip - don’t make the same mistake I did - get BlueCross/BlueShield, IHC, Kaiser, etc. If an individual insurance plan seems to be really inexpensive through a company like Mega Life, there is a reason - the coverage is no good!
But even a huge hospital bill (among other debts) didn’t worry me too much because my wife and I were both working. The debt did mean we had to figure things out financially, but everything looked like it would work out fine.
Murphy’s Law: The world will kick you when you’re down
So things were looking a little up - then it happened. My wife went to work yesterday and was told that she didn’t have a job anymore. They gave her a little bit of money and a kick in the pants on the way out the door. We had just figured out our finances, then I had to go and take out her income and rework the numbers - I was frustrated because they weren’t looking good.
Bob Parsons inspired me
I consider Bob Parsons to be one of the best entrepreneurs of our time, not because of his enormous success as the founder of GoDaddy, but because he is very down to earth. In his blog, he talks about some of the hard times (financially) that he had prior to his success with GoDaddy and Parsons Technology.
I read a recent post from Bob’s blog where he recounts being petrified after taking out an advertising loan for $50K. His dad told him, “Well Robert, if it doesn’t work, they can’t eat you!” His point, of course, is that if everything goes south, it isn’t the end of the world.
The worst case scenario isn’t all that bad
So, following Bob Parson’s advice, I started considering what the worst possible outcome could be for our situation. As Bob points out, there is no debtor’s prison in America, so that’s not a concern. Basically, if the worst of the worst happens, we will have some debts we will have to deal with for a while - not the end of the world.
My wife is a better person than me
My wife didn’t require the convincing that I did that everything would be alright. She was a little bit hurt about losing her job and said she would miss her friends, but she has an incredible ability to keep everything in perspective. While I was stressing about paying the bills, her approach was much more simple - she said we should pay our tithing first, then just start paying what we can. It was simple to her.
I feel better about things now
I’m still not sure how everything is going to work out, but I’m not really worried about it. In fact, my wife has a job interview tomorrow. Even if it doesn’t work out, I know that something will. Ernst & Young has a very hostile work environment, so it is a good thing that she’s not working there anymore. For example, one of Jen’s coworkers was recently criticized by a manager for putting her family before work - of course she was! That’s what a good parent does!
Although the initial blow was tough, Jen seems happier now and she is excited to find a job that she enjoys. Like so many things that we have gone through in the past few years, we have learned that most challenges we go through are blessings in disguise.
Marriage changes everything
As I mentioned in my first post, marriage has been a great thing for me. It didn’t seem like a difficult transition to make and I would never go back to single life again. But don’t get me wrong, there are still a lot of changes.
For instance, when I was single, I always did my own laundry. If I could fit all of my clothes into the washer at one time, I would do one load - darks, lights, whites, etc. - it didn’t matter. If I had too many clothes (two weeks worth or so), I would separate my clothes into colors and whites.
Things are different when you are married. For instance, I just did five loads of laundry (about three days worth). And not only did I have to separate them into darks, lights and whites, but I actually (seriously) did a pink load of laundry. Never, ever, in my single days would I have thought that you could do a load of all pink clothing, but apparently it is possible.
Another example - dinner. When you are single, dinner is making an entree and eating it with some kind of drink to wash it down. Not anymore - now, we need to have “color” and napkins. Foreign concepts to me, but it makes her happy.
Marriage is great, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that things won’t change - especially if you have a wife as wonderful (read:stubborn) as mine is.