Being pulled down again

It was too good to be true.

 

I was making good headway into paying down my debt. I had the work with a company on Phoenix, US which was helping me bring in about $1200 each 15 days. In recent months I had started doing IT work for a small wine company for $250/month and some extra work for a friend for about $100/week.

 

All this plus my regular day job was helping pay my regular expenses and start paying the debt plus the big expense of my daughter's school tuition fees on a monthly basis.

 

Then came "the call". I was asked to call the IT manager on the Phoenix company. He was a new person as I had been on the IT manager position since January 2012. He had come in on June 2012 and started learning the ropes of how things worked. He wanted to make big changes which I agree with. Unfortunately those changes require a lot of money to do. in January 2013 he started talking to me about having to do some cuts and that he wanted me to cut down my hours of work for them. He did say he wanted me to stay on the job as I was his backup when he got sick on had to take time off from work or to do other tasks.

 

So that call had two sides. The positive is that I would still be able to work for them. The negative is that my income from them would be cut back. I still didn't know how much since he wanted to finish some stuff before discussing with me how much to cut my hours.

 

Then in mid february he gave me cold facts. I had to cut down my hours by half. Sure he asked if I was ok with it, but what could I say? I could say no and he could easily let me go or just say that it was for the best interest to take his offer. So I agreed anyway, knowing it would meant $1000 LESS each month.

 

$1000 less each month is devastating to me. Specially because as I explained this to my wife and kids, they sort of understood, but keep making the same demands for stuff. They keep wanting to do this or that, buy this or that, go here and there. I keep reminding them about my new situation and they just say that it's something urgent or needed, or that i'm exagerating the situation or that I'm a greedy man that keep pressuring them all the time.

 

My hopes now are placed on my day job. I'm starting a new project that i'm managing almost totally by myself. My boss had budgeted to get another person to do most of this work once I had it all set up. However in February he told me that things were tight and he wasn't going to actually get another person. He also mentioned that if I could do the job on a daily basis he would "improve my salary". Those are very vague words. He mentioned that the other person would earn L15,000/month but he wouldn't say how big of a raise he would give me once the project is running normally. So i'm hoping on a vague thing.

 

I'm not giving up. I'm starting a supermarket delivery service, once again on my own since my wife doesn't want to help me because she "hates going to the supermarket", even though she has all the time in the world to do this. This is very frustating.

 

She wants a regular office job where she can ask someone what to do and probably push papers from one pile to another without much brainwork. I keep looking for opportunities for her but they rarely call her even though she has a Master's degree in Human Resource Management. I suppose it's due to her being in her 40's with only a couple of years of job experience on HR.

 

At this point I have no clue how things will shape up in a couple of months. I don't know how I will pay my daughter's tuition this year and next. By mid 2014 my oldest will go to college which will be a relief since she will be  applying for a scholarship due to her excellent grades. Otherwise I will have to ask her to go to the public university or to a private one but with less classes each semester. However that's in around 16 months or so.

 

I try not to think too much about all this not because i'm in denial, but because I already know I need to bring in more money and cut down on expenses. If I starting to think too much about my current situation I could get too anxious, too desperate, too depressed and would get sick and would not be able to work.

 

I also started looking for work on craigslist by looking for telecommuter jobs, hoping that some other company like the one in Phoenix allows me to work from here for them. IF you know someone that would like to have their systems managed remotely please let me know.

 

I hope you had a good holy week.