Beating Broke

Personal Finance from the Broke Perspective

Save a Little Money with PaperBack Swap

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One of the sure fire ways to save money that is touted here and everywhere is to cancel cable service.  Whether you cancel the whole thing or just pare down to the smallest package for network stations, you’re left with a fair chunk of time to do something else.  Again, another suggestion to take up that time is to read a book.  I completely agree.  Depending on the book, it can be entertaining or educational or both.

One of the downsides to taking up reading is that even a paperback book can cost almost $10 at most of the bookstores.  Amazon is slightly better, but not by much.  The all time cheapest way to read a book is from your local library.  The downfall there, of course, is that you have to return the book in a set amount of time.  That puts the pressure on to read the book or to remember to go in and re-check-out the book.  I don’t like to be rushed and I have a horrible memory for errands like that, so I prefer to buy the books that I read.

With our current situation, I am unable to buy as many books as I once did and now depend largely on gifts for my new book purchases.  Yay Amazon gift cards!  Another way that I’ve found to get my hands on a book cheaply is to swap it.  I think there are a few places to swap books, but the one that I’ve been using is PaperBack Swap.  It works on a credit system, so each book that you list and send to someone else gets you a credit to request a book from someone else.  All you have to do is pay for the shipping to get it where it’s going.  You get a new book for about $2.38.  That’s  quite the deal if you ask me.

So far, I’ve only gotten a few books, but I’m picking up steam and I may start looking at my local thrift store for books to swap for books that I want to read.  If there are any of you who are using a different service, please let me know what they are.  I’d like to check them all out.  They’re just another way to become a Frugaler!

My Wife Quit Her Job: The Hits Keep On Rolling

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It would appear that the saga is far from over.  (If you want the full story, you can read part 1 of My Wife Quit Her Job) Just when you think you can’t handle any more of a challenge, a little more gets thrown on top.  Obviously, God knows we can handle more.

Since my wife quit her job, we’ve been paying for Cobra health insurance to continue with the coverage that we had.  It was a bit of an increase since you pay for the company portion as well as what you would have normally paid, but we had already met our deductible and it pays 100% after that.  That full coverage bit helped us justify the extra couple of hundred that we had to pay each month.  But earlier this week, we got a letter from my wife’s former employer that informed us that the cost of the insurance would be going up and that beginning on the 1st of September we would have to pay that.

I probably don’t have to tell you that the increase puts an even deeper kink in our financial situation.  We may have to lose the 100% coverage in exchange for the plan that I get from work.  It’s only marginally cheaper than the original Cobra price, but even more so now that we’ve been hit with this increase.  The only part I haven’t worked out is if we would be better off keeping the Cobra coverage until the end of the year.  Any new deductible that we might have to meet may offset any extra premiums that we would have to pay.  Decisions, Decisions.

On a brighter note, the business that my wife and her friends started is still doing well.  She’s even expecting to get her first paycheck from the new company this month!  Certainly not a full paycheck, but getting closer.

My Wife Quit Her Job

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Before you get all excited, this isn’t a story of financial bliss.  Less than 3 months after our second child, a daughter, was born and amid all this turmoil in the economy, my wife quit her job.  Why?  Suffice to say that she was extremely unhappy at the position and didn’t feel that she could return to it after her maternity leave.

The decision came much easier for her than it did for me.  I didn’t have to work there, so I didn’t have the same problems as she did.  But, most of all, my trepidation came from the fact that my salary alone could not support us.  We would need to find a new source of income, and quickly.

Decisions made, my wife sent her resignation letter to her employer.  And then they sent back a bill.  You see, my wife was on maternity leave which is covered under the Family Medical Leave Act.  In that law, there is a section that states that if the employee does not return from the FMLA leave, the employer can reclaim any expenses such as health insurance that they incurred while the employee was on leave.  It was not a small bill.  If I recall (who am I kidding.  I remember.) it was just over $1200.00.  As you can imagine, we were both devastated.  Not only were we jumping directly out of the pan and into the fire, but now they had turned up the flame.  We could pay it out of savings, but it would put a very serious dent in it.  And that was money that we were counting on to keep our bills paid until my wife started earning money again.

You’ll have to excuse me a bit, while I digress.  I want to explain how we planned on getting my wife making money again.  We have, for several years, been active sellers on eBay.  Never anything on any grand scale.  We’d hit a garage sale here, and an estate sale or auction there and see what kind of easter eggs we could find.  Having had that already in gear, we decided that ramping it up would be the easiest (and fastest) way to get some income coming back in.  So, we began the search for more product and more suppliers for the product.  End digression.  I think I’ll leave any other details of that operation to another post.

So, being the natural arguer that I am, I started doing a little bit of research on FMLA law.  I’m no lawyer, so basically all I did was confuse myself further.  My brother, on the other hand, is a lawyer.  Well, he will be sometime around May of next year.  But, he happens to be working at a law firm and has access to all the lawyers and their resources.  So, I asked him to look into it a little.  A few text messages back and forth.  An email or two. And a letter later.  The bill went away.  Turns out, that by requiring my wife to take all of her remaining sick/vacation time as well as using her short term disability insurance (both of which were enough time to cover the entire 12 weeks), they managed to make it so that they couldn’t reclaim that money.  Sucks for them.  Turns out very well for us.  Thank you brother.  And thank you law firm that he works for, for the pro bono work on the letter.

After that was taken care of, we could really concentrate on ramping up the eBay selling.  We spent several weeks working out and implementing a way to grow the business.  As it turns out, it grew a little bit slower than we had anticipated.  And it certainly wasn’t going to make enough money to cover our expenses.  At least, not right away.  It might in the future.  I, being the one that constantly worries (read stresses) about our finances, was beginning to think that it was about time for my wife to start looking for a part time job, if not a full time one.  Little did I know the hidden paths that God reveals to us.

I told you before that the company that my wife worked for before wasn’t the greatest place to work.  Truth is, it started out as a really nice place to work.  Somewhere in between, it went very downhill.  My wife’s best friend got fired, my Wife got passed over for promotions that she had been promised.  And overall, everyone was fed up with the place.  So, another of their ex-coworkers, who is also a friend, approached them with an offer.  They would start their own company, doing the exact same thing as their previous employer.  They all three loved what they were doing, just not the company, so it made a lot of sense.

That was about three months ago.  They have since formed a corporation, gotten all their paperwork and such in order and opened for business on the 1st of August.  So far, things are going very well.  They’ve had more business than they had anticipated and things seem to be growing well.  We’re all hopeful that it will continue to blossom and grow.  Maybe one day, I’ll get to be strictly self-employed.

Of course, some of you will remember that I told you earlier that this wasn’t a story of financial bliss.  It may become one, but it isn’t yet.  We are still struggling to make our financial ends meet and likely will until at least the end of the year.  My wife gets paid for the time she works at the company and will likely get a little bit of a shareholder bonus at the end of the year as well.  And hopefully, they’ll be able to add a few new products to their line by then as well.  Until then, however, we’re learning how to flex our frugal muscles and save as much as possible so that we can pay our bills.