Are you out of your mind?

When I opened my homepage this morning I saw this article: Got $2,500? Buy A House

Seriously? I can think of many better ways to use $2,500 than as a down payment. The whole article seems like a complete joke. I have been following Dave Ramsey's lifestyle change for around a year and a half and it has changed the way I look at my money. If we stay in this town and end up buying a house, we will pay cash for it.

I had to LoL at one of the lines from the article. "it's possible to buy a $150,000 starter home for about $1,000 a month, taxes and insurance included".


I see sooo many things wrong with that one line. Only $1,000 a month. $150,000 starter home. Ha! I am sure this is not the case everywhere but here, in the town I live in, $40,000 is closer to starter home prices. We only paid $20,000 for our 1st (and still current) home, but we went cheap and temporary, not awesome and forever.

Here, $150,000 would buy 5-6 bedrooms, 2-4 bathrooms, walk-in closets, 2 stories, a garage, a deck, and landscaping in one of the nice areas.

I love living in a small town.

How about "$1,000 a month, taxes and insurance included"? Ha at that one too. My house payments would have been $350 a month (had we not paid cash), tax for a year is around $150 and insurance on our home is $64 a year.

No wonder the economy is shitty! That is NOT an awesome deal to me. It isn't even a good deal.

Or is it?

Have low prices in my small town ruined me? I know that if we ever move to a place with a population over 10,000 I will be in complete culture shock. Are $150,000 2 bedroom shoe boxes actually normal?

I took a drive today

through town at lunch time.

This is what I saw:
Fast food parking lots-empty
Grocery store parking lots-empty
Walmart parking lot-empty
Video rental parking lot-empty
Gas stations-empty
Repair shops-empty
Furniture stores-empty
The banks-empty
Coffee shops-empty

The only things that had a noticeable amount of traffic? The PAWN SHOP and the roach motels.

I really hope things start turning around pretty quickly otherwise we are going to turn into a ghost town.

Stupid Railroad

Ugh! I am so frustrated with Hubbs' job, I could scream.

They are taking his retention board away on Monday.
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For the non-railroad people: The retention board is for the guys (and a few girls) that don't have enough seniority to hold a spot on one of the regular boards. The retention board pays a small wage plus keeps the health insurance available. The people in charge instated the retention board a few years ago so all the new people with low seniority wouldn't quit.

At the time the retention board was instated, it was cheaper to pay these employees to stay employed with the railroad than it was to let them quit and have to hire and train new people. Well, now YEARS have gone by and it is no longer cheaper to keep the retention board.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Shit.Shit.Shit!

Hubbs has to chase work again. The only problem with that is, there really isn't much work to chase. It is going to get really bad the first week of January. That is when the railroad is going to cut jobs nation-wide.

Luckily, Hubbs has almost 3 years under his belt. He will be able to work somewhere, just not here. Don't know where, don't know for how long, don't know much of anything.

To be able to work our local railroad station, you would have to have a minimum of 6 years seniority starting next month.

In the past, when the economy goes down the shitter, the railroad is the last to be hit and the first to recover. I don't see a recovery happening any time soon.

Uhhhhh........I just lost my train of thought.

Anyway, Hubbs faxed in his request for 21 days of unpaid leave. That will take him into next month so hopefully he can figure out a place to go that he can stay at until he can work the local station. If he can work it at all.

Our station has a 5 year primary recall. More railroad lingo: Primary recall is an amount of time that you HAVE to be available to work that station. So that means if Hubbs goes to, say Iowa again, and our station picks back up enough to need him, he HAS leave Iowa and come back here.

After his 5 years are up, he can go anywhere in the network and never come back if he doesn't want to.

The only thing that is keeping us from picking up and moving to somewhere he can hold a job is this stupid primary recall. Well, that and my job.

If, in January, things really look like I think they are going to look, we might be moving. Not sure where yet though.

These are the places we have been discussing:
Trinidad, CO
Sweetwater, TX
Denver, CO
and a few others that I cant remember.

The Story On Hubbs

So earlier in the week, I mentioned being home. Here is the story about that. Yes, I know it is Thursday and I am just barely getting around to this. Forgive me please. It has been a rough week.



We drove to the valley Friday night and stayed in the Hilton. Very nice hotel and thanks to hotels.com, we got the room for $59.00 a night. Of course there was the $15.00 extra person charge (bringing the total bill to $74.00) but still, a night at the Hilton for under $100.00 is pretty good. Oh the room was nice. There was only 1 queen sized bed but the couch made out to a bed. Soft towels, fluffy bed, never ending hot water and a balcony. It was a little piece of heaven.



Traffic was a breeze. We did have a hard time getting around though. I am directionally dyslexic. I cant tell left from right or east from north. Long story short, normally if I don't know exactly how to get there, I don't even try. So finding a restaurant to have dinner at, the actual hotel, a restaurant to have breakfast at and finally the airport was a nightmare.



We had dinner at Applebees. I can honestly say that it was the best thing I have eaten in a really long time. I got a grilled chicken Caesar salad (awesome), Hubbs got steak and shrimp (awesome) and Monk Man had a breaded chicken sandwich as big as my hand (again, awesome). Now usually, I don't like shrimp. But I let Hubbs talk me into tasting it and it was divine!

Monk Man behaved pretty well throughout the whole trip. He only got spanked once and that was when he tried to open the room door and escape.

We had to be at the airport early so while we were there, I bought a Starbucks coffee. It was the first I had had in about a year. Monk Man discovered escalators. OMG, he loved them. Up and down and up and down and up, the WHOLE morning. Hubbs had to take him because I have an irrational fear of escalators (elevators too).

When it got close enough to Hubbs flight time, he told us that we should just go ahead and start the drive home. We said our goodbyes and my the time I got into the parking garage, I was bawling so hard that I had lost the car. That was so fun, I want to do it every day.

When I finally did find the car, Monk Man crawled in his car seat and fell asleep before I had even made it to the bottom of the parking garage. He slept the whole way home. 3+ hour drive, even when I stopped for gas (which was 4.11/gal holy crap!).

This is horrible

As you may or may not know, I work at a body shop. I am the parts girl. Business is s-l-o-w. I have been sitting here for hours, not doing a damn thing except feeding my BabyCenter addiction.

I walked around to the shop a little while ago and the guys are just sitting around with nothing to do either. I feel really bad for them. They all work off commission so no wrecks=no paycheck. It has been really slow around here for months.

I wonder what is causing this lack of work. I mean I am sure that the crappy state of the economy has a lot to do with it. But you can be as careful as you can be and shit just happens.

Right now, we are to the point that we are taking in whatever piddly ass that job comes our way. It is really sad.

Everybody I have talked to lately, from dealerships to parts suppliers, say business is way slow too.

I have always dreamed of owning my own business. I have these amazing ideas and then I figure out how unrealistic most of them are or that someone has already come up with my brilliant idea.

It is times like this that make me thankful that I never actually followed through with any of my bright ideas. Talk about being up shit creek! But I guess it could be worse, I could be commission based too. Thank god for hourly wages.