Busy month
This has been a busy month so far. With school, freekin’ army crap, and three weeks of work crammed into 5 days, along with a stressed wife…it’s been busy.
There are good points. I only have one more two week period to play army this year up until the deployment. I’ll have the regular drills, and one 2 day class in the end of August, but that’s it. In 3 weeks, I’ll have my AAS, only 90 hours into my BAS. It’s a 1 mile stone, only have 99 more miles to go :) I’ll also be interviewing for a new position here in my office. It’s out of my career field, but overall I think it’ll help a lot in the future. If I get it, it’ll also assure that I have a job after we redeploy back home – a nice feeling.
I’ve done more work on my other website, it looks a lot better. I’ve also got another guy lined up to help me when I get deployed with my one client.
I haven’t forgotten about this blog, just been very busy, and it only seems to be getting busier as the time goes by. Once I have the Masters done in a couple of years, I’ll actually be able to settle down and enjoy life a little, hopefully. By that time my wife will probably hate me, but at least she’ll see more of me ;)
Plugging a website
My sister got her website up and running :) I helped a little bit, but she did 99% of the work. It looks very professional.
You can see her site here, at www.karenavelikan.com
Paycheck to Paycheck
The link in the title is from a story my sister sent me. It’s about living paycheck to paycheck, and how budgets are getting stretched even more than usual lately.This sort of ties into a conversation I had with a friend Saturday as well. He mentioned that it seemed that we were doing pretty well, have a nice house, so forth. I told him that it’s not because I make a lot of money, it’s that we are careful in how we spend our money.
We’re still in the red-zone though. As of right now, if I were to lose my job, we have 90 days worth of funds to live on. That’s not much. I add about 30 days worth of sustainability to that every 3 months, but doing the math, I’m giving us 4 months of cushion every year. To me, this doesn’t sound like much, and realistically, it’s not. I also know that we’re doing a lot better than those making a lot more than us as well, and it’s because we budget like mad. There’s rarely a penny spent on something trivial, and this is how we do it.
Don’t spend money if you want to save it.
I realize that there are those that don’t, and are still barely making it by…but there is a reason for this as well…they’re not equitable to someone else.
This moves onto my second part of this post…getting an education. It really doesn’t matter if you go to a trade school, or do what I’m doing and get a bachelors then a masters…you have to have something to show someone else that they’re going to pay for your time because you’re going to offer them something. If you did not graduate high school, get your GED. If after you get your GED and still can’t find a job, find some professional certification that you’re trying to get a job in, and get that.
Why is this important? It is because the employer does not know you from anybody else on the street, and they want proof that you are capable of learning, of fulfilling responsibility, and of seeing a task through to the end. So you say, I’m a hard worker…but that employer is going to say, you don’t have your GED, and I’m a single mother who got a degree, how did you work harder to get this job than I?
For most of us, living paycheck to paycheck is because of the decisions we make. If I were in this situation, there is not any way to place blame on someone else because I just don’t feel like making myself equitable.
Getting an education is hard. It’s a trial by fire to see that you’re capable of following through to a goal you set. It shows that you have the chops to constantly learn new ideas and implement them into finished products.
Until you can show someone that your time is worth paying for, you won’t get paid for your time.
If you don’t want to live paycheck to paycheck, there are three things to do. Budget every dime you have, and don’t spend more than that budget; Save something every month, even if it’s $20. It’ll pay off later on; Get an education in something, make your time something an employer wants to pay for.
