Coming to an end

My husband will be home tonight, so his 6 week long absence will finally be at an end. I know he is ready to be home and frankly I'm ready for him to be back! The first 4 weeks were ok but these last 2 weeks have been kind of brutal mentally. I've been up and down with some depression, lonely, etc. Not use to having him gone so long. But all that ends tonight! Ya! My kids have handled it quite well, and I did get to spend some nice time with them. We went to a Murder Mystery Dinner playhouse last week which was so much fun! This week I took them to the art museum in downtown Denver then we walked around for a bit and had an early dinner in downtown Denver. That was really nice. I also finally went out for drinks with a few friends, so this week was busier than usual but still miss my DH.

In other news, I have called the attorney and spoke with him a few times, still no response so I'm submitting my response to summons today. Will be taking it to the courthouse in about an hour. In my response I did mention that last year as well as these past two weeks we have tried to work out a payment plan, I stated we are unable to understand how to make arrangements for this debt if we do not receive responses back from the plaintiff! I do hope the judge sees that and forces them to actually give us some sort of response or starting point. If they would have done that last year I'm sure we would have been well on our way getting this account under control.

But I must say I'm glad something is being done, this is 76K of our debt in collections and if we work something out that will only leave to credit cards in collections. So as slow as it seems we are working through this mess. We have settled 3 cards already, which their balances totalled some where around 40 - 45k, would have to look back at my posts to see the exact amount, we have also paid for a 5K used car, paid off 9k - 10K for our business loan, paid down our card by about 8K and paid 9K of new debt (medical bills) all in the last 18 months. So we have made tremedous progress and with each step forward my stress level goes down alittle! (although their have been A LOT of bumps in the road) We are still moving forward.

Will update you on what the court says once I know.

Update on Summons - no update

Well I didn't hear from the lawyer on Friday, so I called this morning and left a message, no return call from them yet. Seems like the other attorney's office last year, I call, speak with them make an offer and no one can bother to get back to me? Thought they wanted their money? Well I'll keep trying to get them, and if I don't hear from them I will submit my response to the court next week. Not sure what happens after that but hopefully if it does go to court the judge will see I'm trying to work with them and getting no response and force them to try and work with us. We don't need a judgment but if I can't get people to call me back what am I to do? I will call them everyday this week and see how that goes.

Two more weeks until DH comes home and really I can't wait, I'm tired of running our household by myself! LOL

Served a Summons

I knew it was coming, just had no idea how long it would take. On Monday I received a summons for the Heloc loan that is defaulted. I guess all the files that were with the attorney I spoke with last year were fired, could be because they never did any work! LOL, I spoke with them last year twice, made offers and tried to work this out and they never did anything or even bother to call me back, so I guess it no surprise they are fired. Anyway, the new attorney for Citibank (that's who holds my Heloc) served my husband and I papers to respond. I really don't want to go to court, and I'm not disputing we owe this debt. I wanted to setup a payment plan last year and couldn't get anywhere. So this seems like a bad thing, but I am keeping my fingers crossed it turns out to be a good thing. I called and spoke with the attorney's office yesterday and made a payment offer, he said he would have some sort of response hopefully by the end of the week, either a rejection or most likely a counter offer of some sort, and maybe, maybe even an acceptance of my monthly payment offer!

Oh and it was pretty painless calling the attorney and talking with them, so if anyone out there has debts they aren't disputing, ususally calling and speaking with the attorney is a pretty easy process.

I'll let you know what they say!

Getting through it all

Well this week so far has seen it's ups and down on the stock market. Some of my friends are worried, some are finding themselves and me, I'm just dealing with it all. I've decided not to stress out to much because I can't personally change what's going on, and can only control this household. So what am I stressing about? Well for starters I think we will owe about 25K for our taxes. We actually had a very good year last year, but as I'm learning, more income, equals skyrocketing taxes! We do have about $15K saved up for this, but the extra 10K was alittle of a shocker. The good thing is it's not so scary working with the IRS anymore. They are making things user friendly, and you can pay your taxes with debt cards as well as setup an installment plan online! I am pretty confident we can come up with this money though out the year, and because we really shouldn't have the 9K in medical bills this year. I should have final numbers in the next week or so, my accountant is slowly working on them trying to find the maxium deducation for us.

As to the stock market and all the doom and gloom, I have decided to continue maxing out my 401k. I made the change at the end of Dec to start Jan 1, to see how it went. And I'm still losing money. But if I don't put the money away thats just more for the gov't to tax, and everything is cheap, it's very hard for us to save and this is one sure way to save at least something, even if we are losing it right now. We have 30 years until we retire, so I hope my gamble pays off in the end. For now, I'll just suck it up, try not to think about it, and let my money keep buying my mutal funds. I'll let you know how that works out in 30 years!

J