Welcome to my blog...

Hmmm... what's this button do?

*ploink*

Ah ha! I get to vent my frustrations and sing about the good life all in the comfort of this little cobweb on the Big Web. Nice.

In all seriousness, inspired by the inimitable Trog and encouraged by the lovely Alarra, I've decided to take a shot at carving out my own space in the blogosphere, for good or ill.

Today I think I'll talk a bit about finances. Mine are a bit of a mess right now. Going way back I made a few bad decisions in my youth and really jacked up my credit. I've been working hard for the last five years or so to try to get that back in check. It's been a bit of a struggle. It seems like unexpected expenses come from all over the place that I can almost but not quite cover and I end up barely treading water or falling behind again.

Now I've bought a house. In almost all respects, this is a good thing financially. You get to have more house for less money in most instances. Okay, okay, in this case it's a lot more house for a little more money. Here's the kicker, though. All my life rental contracts have asked me to provide 30 days notice that I'm not going to be renewing my lease and moving out. Apparently out here on the east coast that's sixty days. The catch is that 60 sixty before my lease ended, I wasn't even looking for a house. I gave my thirty days notice and got told that I'll be held responsible for 60 days worth of rent. Well bugger. This means that now, for April, I'm going to owe both mortgage AND rent. This I cannot afford. Even if I forego food and bills for the month, I don't even make enough money to pay for them both. Okay, okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but it's true that there's no way I can afford both. If I could've, I'd have bought a bigger/newer house.

But wait, there's more. Let's talk taxes, shall we? For the last 19 years I've been filing as Head of Household. That's a pretty significant standard deduction, apparently. I can't do that this year because my daughter up and got herself married and isn't my dependant anymore. Well, it didn't occur to me that this would drastically affect the amount of withholdings I'd need to have through the year. When I went to file for 2007, I checked the HoH box like I have for years and years and got a prompt (I use TurboTax) saying I need to have a qualifying dependant for that. What!? I says to myself. Well crap. So I uncheck the box and I go from getting a moderate return of a couple of hundred dollars to owing. A lot. No, more than that. A tidy sum just over $2,100.

Toss this in the "more out than in" salad I've got going and I'm starting to stress a bit. But wait, there's more. "More?" you say? Yes. You see, also in the last year I've fallen in love (yay!) and in due accord with that we're planning to get married in July in South Dakota. We're doing it very low budget and we're getting a lot of help with the expenses there, but it's still feeding into my worries about being able to stay afloat.

There're other things too. Little things here and there that keep popping up. Minor house repairs and upgrades that we need to make, moving her stuff into the house from VA, diesel costing $4 a gallon, that kind of thing. It all just makes me tweak. At times I just sit in a dark room in a near panic wondering how I'm going to pull all of this together.

Thank heavens for Alarra. She's been my rock these last couple of months. She's been really good at pinching a few pennies and keeping me in check and reassuring me that, while it might get ugly, we'll pull through it and everything will be fine. And likely in just a few months too. She's set to graduate from Eastern Virginia Medical School with her MS in Art Therapy here in the middle of May. She's holding off looking for work until after the wedding, but once that's behind us and we're living in wedded bliss, her income, no matter how much it is, will greatly ease the amount of stress on our combined pocket books.

And this year has been flying by, so that should be even sooner than it sounds like it would be. It'll be okay. It'll be okay. It'll be okay.

Okay. Well, thanks for tuning in to this first edition of Zeb's Life in the Troll Cave. Leave me a note and let me know you were here, okay?

Zeb, Out.