sixteen days--day fourteen

Yes, it's quite a jump from one to fourteen, but with good reason.

In two weeks, major leaps of faith were made, patience wore thin, and a flu bug took us both down like a huge heavy rock.

I believe I had mentioned that I had sought advice on one of the multitudinous debt reduction sites, and if not, the overall response to my post was move to a lower cost of living area. After much hemming and hawing, and unfortunately some more (and hopefully last) borrowing of funds, that is exactly what we aim to do. One day ahead of schedule, we will be driving down to the Raleigh area of North Carolina to a shared house rental and starting Monday will be embarking on an interview intensive week that hopefully will yield employment before the week's end, even if it means yet another minimum wage job for the time being.

The main reason behind this is that we can clearly see that short of a miracle call, things are not going to be that much financially better just because we move to a place that's $400 less a month, especially when it increases my hubby's commute to 46 minutes longer each way. Instead, we're now moving to a place that is just over $400 a month, and also includes utilities, which means we'll be saving more than $1500 a month from what we paid for the place we're about to leave. Yes, the numbers are right, and no, we weren't living in a place beyond what basic living and still being connected by phone and web costs. It's just that darned expensive here, and that darned inexpensive there. So even if only one of us finds a minimum wage type job right away (hopefully full time), bills will be paid and there will still be money left over.

I know that some folks might shirk at the idea of shared living, but it's only a month to month because we had a devil of a time renting a place out of state that we would hope to call home. There were too many risks involved, and the week we were hoping to go down to do interviews and look at places was the week the flu hit. And when you have a fever one degree shy of what requires a hospital visit, you don't travel 9 hours by car. So we were lucky to find the share which will allow us more time to gain both employment and more permanent living arrangements. From what we've been told by folks from the area as well as seen for ourselves, once we move to a house of our own, we might be spending about $6-700 a month for COL (cost of living) expenses, which is still a little more than a third of what we had to here.

Other things we did in the meantime was continue to use freecycle to try to narrow down what we would take with us, which has had some successes, some not so successes, as well as have a list of jobs we will be applying for as soon as we get there, and making sure that we have something to live off of just in case it takes more than a week or two to secure something.

The truck is now parked outside, we're packing it up, and we will be leaving on Saturday instead of Sunday to give ourselves a day to breathe and, if necessary, stash some things in storage that there may not be room for at our shared house before hitting the interview week.

It's going to be chaos for the next few days. But at least we now have a much better plan in motion to seriously move for the best reasons.