It's been 1 year since I lost my job

Originally posted HERE

It's been a year now since I got laid off my job. I can hardly believe it! A whole year! How time flies. I just looked at how much money my new company made so far (it's been 1 year today), and it's over 5 times as much profit as I made working at my previous job. Wow! So now the other question I have to ask is.... where did all the money go?! I guess I'd have to ask my wife that. She's the one who spends it. We did get a suburban, playground set, swimming pool/spa, vita-mix, extended patio, table set and furniture. I basically upgraded some parts in my computer and bought some software – that's the extent of my personal spending, and that's hardly a luxury, since it was considered a business expense. Oh, I guess I did buy an HD video camera, but, again, I needed it for my book trailer.

Fortunately, we don’t really have anything else to buy. All of our long-term desires have been met. And now there is just one tiny little thing I will do with our money... promote my book. But I suppose we have invested quite a lot of money as well and given quite a lot to charity (12 to 13% of our gross). We maxed out our education IRAs, increased my life insurance, invested in mission funds for 5 boys, added money to our retirement fund and mutual funds. We maxed out our insurance deductibles last year and this year because of Jared. We did pay several thousand dollars out of pocket that our insurance company didn’t cover. We put an extra $500 a month towards the principal of our house and an extra $20,000 to boot. I have two goals now: pay off our house and promote my book.

So, momentarily, this year has been wonderful. Emotionally, it has been the hardest year of my life. I got a couple white hairs in my beard! Arrg! I sometimes wish I hadn’t been laid off my job. Life was simpler back then (I only worked 60 hours a week). But then again, we wouldn’t have any of the things I mentioned that we bought and there’s almost no way I would have any significant money to promote my book. In the end, all is good. My business is coming to a close soon. I can feel it. I suspect we’ll have enough money to live off of for a couple years, but after that.... well, I just hope my book takes off. I have some other more long-term solutions. They won’t bring in near as much money but they should be consistent and less stressful. I lost $100,000 earlier this year from a fluke incident. After thinking about it some more, I probably lost half a million dollars of potential earnings because of the incident. Oh, well. That’s life. I just read online last night of someone who lost $200,000 doing the same business I was doing. It could have been worse for me. I was able to bounce back fairly quickly.

P.S. My wife and I are ultra conservative when it comes to spending. If we can't pay with cash, we don't buy it. We've never spent a single cent on credit card interest our whole lives. That's probably why we were able to bounce back from the "incident" so easily.