My husband was let go from his job Saturday.  I was ready for change in my life, but I wasn’t quite expecting that big of a change.  But life is change.  I can’t say that this is for good or bad, it just is.  We mourned the change for a bit, and then we let it go and figured if we have each other, then we can face this and handle it.

We looked at the good things this change brings us:  more time to spend together.  Because he worked in retail, weekends to go to events were a rarity.  More attention to dedicate to changing our diet and converting to more holistic natural therapies.  Time to get our house in order.  A reason to give up more clutter, to sell it for some extra income.  Time for my husband to delve further into his passion for coffee by reading and roasting and researching.  Time for him to concentrate on getting more grounded, and searching out a path forward that’s in line with his bliss.  Time to put all my research on DIY natural home products to the test!

I can’t say we ignored the negatives of this change.  The loss of a second income, though it was the lesser income, is still a blow to our budget.  We were finally starting to save up an emergency fund, and now that fund becomes even more important to contribute too.  I hunkered down and created a new preliminary budget.  We had to toss almost all extra expenses.  We can still make all our bills, and our food, and still have some money for other necessaries and some occasional fun.  We’ll have to cut the cable service down to cut out the pay movie channels, but we’ll still keep the extended TV channels for now because we have a grandfathered package that is cheaper than anything else they currently sell, so replacing it later would be more expensive.  If things get tougher we’ll have to drop it.  The internet service stays, I telecommute and it’s a necessity.  I’ll look into refinancing our mortgage to a lower rate and rolling in the home equity loan, I’ve been putting that off for a long time.  We’ll have to really really REALLY pay attention to where our money goes and not let anything slip into the “other expenses” sinkhole.  Before it was always “oh well, we didn’t manage to save anything this month”.  Now it will be more like “oh crap it’s only the 23rd and we have no more money for food and gas until the 30th”.

Funny thing is, we had been discussion joining the gym again, but didn’t think it would work because of his variable work schedule.  Now we have the time, but not the money.  C’est la guerre.