Sunday, August 20, 2006

Stress and icy Pit of Despair

I was hear at this place many times when I was in my early 20s. Recently, I have escaped the corporate American hollowly that is the American dream. Yeah, right, nightmare.

Then it was mergers, acquisitions, was I doing my job well enough to keep it? It was a horrible time, I remember a time in 1989 where I was in tears because my car had died. No, tears is not a good enough word, gut wrenching sobs inspired by true panic over the situation where my only source of transportation was dead. My income relied on that car. Obviously, this was all eventually overcome on our own resources,

Now I am growing a business, but have not been working on it as hard as I should certaintly not hard enough to start socking money away for the onset of disaster.

Not to mention that I don't have a real support system of close friends or family (except my husband). So there you are, fifty stories in the air and looking down. There is no net in sight. Okay that might be a slight exaggeration, there are savings and ways that I would rather not use to tap into other available sources of $$$$s to keep this roof over our head.

What happened? Robert's job is again in jeopardy. An internal audit has been done, and actually many are in jeopardy in Robert's company. Of course, this all happened as he was traveling to Colorado (this may have been luck, we will see tomorrow), and his father was in the hospital for hip surgery. The stress and worry over his father and this, have sent Robert home early in the middle of the project. It also allowed for others to report back to him the scope and scale of what was happening. That's the only good thing that has happened.

The problem is a few procedures that have been encouraged by the higher ups to increase sales, are now being used to potentially fire (and I think close the branch with as little severance pay as possible) many employees, especially the managers. This does not bode well to me.

Unfortunately, we have just taken on a mortgage that is .....Higher than normal. Granted it is paid into the future, and now I am trying to figure out just how to pay it more into the future. We have our tenants that aren't going anywhere soon, which is lucky. The dog training business has been doing well, though I should have been doing more marketing et during this time, instead of taking it easy and enjoying life. Ugh.

We do have our retirement savings, which we can cash in if we need to. It goes without saying, I would rather avoid that. Plus if we do that, there goes our safety net. Oh, yes, there is the loss of health insurance, that my husband at least needs. We will probably need to keep it just to cover his prescription costs anyway. So if Monday comes, and Robert comes home for awhile, instead of concentrating on growing the business, I am going to need to recalculate our future success rate with all of that.

Yeah, a bit stressed out. Not to mention my three dogs and one cat that I can't let anything happen to.