Hard times - at least they can’t eat us Internet Marketing for Internet Retail : The Preston Blog

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.

9:49 pm