Undertaking

My sister is developmentally disabled.

This has been a prominent factor throughout my life. My family didn't like to discuss it, but its there, like an elephant in the room. Our world is both cruel and beautiful. I understand the preference to pretend its not true. The truth however, cannot stay hidden for long.

My sister got married and went out on her own. Her husband also developmentally disabled. What we hoped and prayed would be two simple people helping each other make their way in the world turned out to be a toxic event. The rapid decline that my family saw my sister take has been difficult.

Its now five years later, they are divorcing (which is for the best) and I'm taking on the task of getting my sister the assistance she needs. We aren't going to brush her condition under the carpet anymore. We are going to face it head on and get the help she needs. This is quite the undertaking, and I hope that we achieve the desired outcome. I'm doing my best to stay positive, but at times I waiver and wonder if we will be met with resistance and closed doors. All I can do is remain persistent and hope that finally I will be able to get her the help she needs and set her on a path that will help enrich her life. Perhaps I can also suppress the guilt that has been inside me, knowing that she can't do all that she is "supposed" to do as well as take the burden off my mom. I hope this is all leading up to a chain of events that will provide peace to my family.

For now, I need a little luck on my side and a lot of persistence.

Take a risk, play it safe

Here we are, considering buying another house!

This is very exciting, yet also stressful. We cannot sell our current house because we would have to take a loss, if we take a loss, we would loose the loan that we have qualified for. Therefore, we have opted to rent our house and become landlords. This is a coin toss situation. While we will do our best to choose the best tenant, you never really know what could happen. This part is the biggest risk.

On the flip side, we could get a larger home for an awesome price and be settled in a better spot to further extend our family and also know that we are buying a house that we do not intend to move from until we retire and would like a small 1000 sq ft home to manage.

So what do we do...well, we are still getting our ducks in order and looking at options for finding the best tenants (i.e. do we hire a management firm, find our own tenant, who will help review the credit checks). Since I have worked in credit management for 9 years, as well consider my self fiscally conservative and responsible I hope that I will be able to extend that judgment to this situation. We have also started to looked at house listings as well as viewed some homes with the realtor we have started working. Yes, this is getting serious and its for real...

Do we take a risk and hope for the best and get the larger home we have been wanting for the past few years, or do we wait and see what happens as the market slowly recovers and hope that we will get a good enough price for our house to assist us in a future purchase. While I have always been a play it safe type of person, I think the risk of getting the home we want and renting our current home is the risk I would like to take. I feel that ultimately, this risk will have the best pay off in the end. Though I may waiver at times and prefer to play it safe and not pursue it for the potential stress factor, ultimately, I feel that once we have all the info we are currently seeking and find the home we really want, everything will just fall into place and we will be happy we did it.

Not everything is easy right, sometimes we have to be uncomfortable for a period in order to get what we want long term....

Fall down, get up

Like most middle class families, every time we get ahead, we somehow get pushed back down again.
We work hard, budget, spend conscientiously, do our best to live within our means, but inevitiably, life intervenes in an unpositive way.
There will always be hurdles, but its hard to process the disappointment of falling into a rut with a cycle of debt. All my plans and hopes sit beside me as I plan my way to get back up. It's only money is what I keep saying to myself. And while we need money and the more of it it seems the less the worries, in the end I know that what I have that is the most valuable is my family and my health.
I'll admit, the size of my bank account is important to me, but only for security reasons. We've worked so hard so we have the cushion, and sometimes we gotta draw on it, no matter how much I hate the reason. It is what it is. It's not worth me worrying so much I compromise my health or am so flustered that I can't enjoy the precious time I have with my family.