Life sucks sometimes.  Especially when you aren’t fully prepared for its suckiness.  I have never really hidden the fact that money is and has been a bit of a struggle.  Partly because I didn’t work for 4 years, to stay home with the kids, and because we are both spenders.  Which is not a good combination.  Ideally a couple should be a balance of a spender and a saver or even better, two savers.  I have never been good with money.  Well, I take that back. I have always been really good at spending money and I have learned over the years, that I use spending like I do food as a comfort for some deeper issue.  I’m working on it slowly and I think that I am beginning to break through.  We’ll see.

So, money is always an issue, especially since we have committed to stop using our credit cards–which was a our go to for so many things that we didn’t need and shouldn’t have bought.  But, I can’t go back, I can only go forward.  And we have created budgets and are working on a cash-only basis and seeing how that works.  It will be a long road until we are debt-free (can only dream of the day the student loans are paid off–in 2040).  We are tackling our credit cards at this point and it would certainly be easier and quicker if we weren’t sending our kids to private school.  We toss the idea around, but I cannot and will not sacrifice their education.  I will sacrifice vacations and other spending before I decide that we can’t afford to send the kids to private school.  We make enough to still be able to get out of debt in about two years with the kids in private school, if we really lock down our spending.

We had a plan and we were feeling optimistic.  Then, I filed our taxes.  This was the first year we didn’t have an adoption tax credit to use and oh yeah–I went back to work and that pushed us up a tax bracket.  We got hit with a huge tax bill, penalties for not paying enough, AMT for making too much but not enough money.  I was floored because we couldn’t come close to paying the tax bill.  I know we are grown up and I’ll be 40 this year and it is depressing to think that we didn’t have enough saved in any capacity to pay for this tax bill.  But we don’t.  We should.  We don’t.  And it makes me depressed, angry, sad, and foolish.

I had to call my mom and tell her what we owed and that we needed the money.  I am lucky to have someone to help bail me out at my age.  It sucks like you can’t even imagine.  It made me feel like a teenager again asking for extra money to go out because I spent all of mine.  She was understanding but also had some words to say that I needed to hear.  We spend our money on things that are silly and that we don’t need.  We spend too much money on the kids and buying stuff for them and we live beyond our means.  This is true and not.  We live within our means if we didn’t have debt, but we do and that just screws it all up.  We think about how much money we can spend as opposed to how much money we could save, etc.  We need a new outlook and to make a severe money mindset change.  Hubs and I make too much money for this to be the case and it is time that I start to respect myself more to realize that money can’t buy me anything that I feel my life is missing and that just because I want something doesn’t mean I get to buy it.

I am trying to teach that to my kids, but how can I expect them to learn it, if I haven’t?  Life sucks sometimes.  But, I’m an adult who is a year away from finishing her PhD.  It’s time I got my shit together and started behaving like it and not like a spoiled little child.