Functionally ReTodded

or at least partial disclosure, I’m going to put an end to the cryptic posts I’ve been submitting as of late and try to let all five of my readers know what’s going on in the life and head of FRT.

(I am also posting this today, which is a public double post and will count for the post on July 5th or 6th that I threw up there and immediately made private, meaning I’m still on track with my blog every day for a year commitment.  Go me!)

DISCLAIMER:  What you are about to read is about 1% funny and 97% serious, with the remaining 2% consisting of Niacin.  If you’re here for a hearty chuckle, this ain’t for you.  Move along and go see what is happening on Twitter .  And I haven’t cleared the disclosure of this information with my wife, so if this blog disappears and you see a picture of a monkey throwing his own poo, you’ll know why.

I’ll go back to the beginning. Well, not the beginning of time, but back a while.

My wife and I suck with money.  Sounds stupid I know.  But we do.  It’s a widely known fact.  Add in that I never got any real financial guidance early on and multiply that by getting thrown out of my house 36 hours after I came home from college with nothing more than my clothes, my bed and a MasterCard I got at college with a thousand dollar credit limit, and you can see where things were headed.

I used the card to live (in addition to buying a guitar that I still have but can’t play), and maxed it out immediately.  Since I was broke and had a shitty job, I couldn’t pay the bill, so it sat.  And I defaulted on the card.  CC default = a credit rating of R9, which means that if you hand someone a hundred dollar bill, they won’t loan you a penny.  I couldn’t even get a checking account.

My now wife had pristine credit (despite zero financial training or guidance either), and we began co-habitating and living below the poverty line.  I got my dad to reluctantly loan me the money to pay off the MasterCard and paid him back per our agreement, but in the meantime, we were living off bologna, milk and bread bought at a gas station with GBD’s credit card since grocery stores didn’t take credit cards back then.

We married, sold some stock (that my dad had been saving for me) to buy our first house, and then ran our credit cards thru the roof.

But since we weren’t moving and the real estate market was good, we refinanced our house, used the money to pay off the card, and over the course of a few years did the same thing again.

When we bought our house in 1992, we paid $106,000ish for it.  When we sold our house in 2003, we sold it for $152,000ish, and walked away with about $12,000 dollars.  You see where this is going.

Thanks to the generosity of family and luck, we found the house we’re in now way below market value and got it with a good deal of equity in it.

I entered into a small business arrangement with someone and took out a 25,000 dollar line of credit on the house to finance the deal, and shocker to no one, it didn’t work out.  I learned a lot.  I also ran thru the twenty five grand.  Plus some.

So two years in, we refinance this house, take equity out, pay back the line of credit (and the all new credit card debt), and start again, but with a higher mortgage payment.

At this point, I expect Susan Powter to run out and yell STOP THE INSANITY!!!

You get the point.  When they talk about debt and Americans and not saving, that’s us.  Period.

Fast forward to 2007.  I was a contractor with shitty insurance when my son was born.  He was immediately sent to the NICU for five days and when it was all said and done, we got a bill for about seventeen grand.  Add in a few unplanned emergencies related to vehicles, etc., and we were credit card full again.

Without going into all of it too deeply, my wife, in an effort to protect me from me, kept how serious our money problems were from me.  It was kind of like the part in "Field of Dreams" where Annie is talking to Ray on the phone while he’s traveling with Terence Mann, and behind her, sitting at the kitchen table, are her brother and the rest of his business partners and they’re looking to take the farm.  I have never been involved in the payment of bills or our finances in general.  She always took care of it.  (FYI:  That’s not a good plan).

GBD was also under some enormous pressure from her job.  A job that allows her to stay home but saw her pay reduced last year significantly, further tightening the situation. That financial and job pressure in addition to running a household with three kids started taking its toll on her personally and us as a couple.

Then I got a boss that had no business being my boss or anyone else’s, and it became her sole mission to get rid of me.  Oh, and I mentioned a while back that uber-corporate giant WidgetCo. had decided to buy our little specialty widget company, and we’re looking at more stress still, considering that I will probably be seeking new employment fairly soon in a not at all great job market.

You get the point.

During that period, my wife has been increasingly concerned that I have an anger problem and that I’m quite possibly suffering from depression.

(To be clear, I’ve never struck or threatened to strike anyone.  In my family anyway.  I’ve threatened to kick the asses of a number of teenagers speeding thru my neighborhood or some douche that hit my car).

I would argue with her that I didn’t have an anger problem, but that no one would listen to me unless and until I got angry.  The depression concern I more or less dismissed out of hand.  For a while.

But recently GBD and I have been drifting apart.  And if not actually drifting apart, then drifting in a similar direction but not near each other, if that makes sense.  It’s not on purpose at all either.  It just seems that the stress levels are so high that (speaking for myself), it’s easy to get into self preservation mode and not worry as much as I should about the people and things around me.

To that end, I contacted and made an appointment with a counselor/therapist/psychiatrist guy to address my issues, both real and perceived.  I feel a little better just having done that.  I hope to Christ it helps, otherwise telling all of this stuff to all of you will be WAY more embarrassing than all of Avitable’s nudity on the interweb.

So that’s why recent posts have been cryptic, morose, and downright sad and pathetic.  But I’m hoping that this is a start to maybe finding out some stuff I don’t know and / or didn’t know were out of whack and try to get them figured out or at least out there for discussion.

That said, who wants some pie?

Hugs,
FRT