Call for Comments

I’m looking at this AdSense option for my blog. It is tempting to add it in and perhaps earn a few bucks to keep my chickens fed.

I visit a variety of blogs, and the ads don’t deter me from reading them. But I’d like to hear opinions from my readers on taking this step.

The following isn’t a plea for pity. Overall I’m pretty happy with my life. What I’m going through now, I consider training for the opening years of post-peak oil. My wife and I have used the last few years to better learn to live with less…

Since Bush took office, I’ve gone from being a very well paid software engineer to a well (often enough), a software engineer looking for work. I had a two year stretch where I worked intermittent short term contracts that added up to about nine months of work. During that period, I worked temp positions on a freight dock, hand loading tractor trailers as the token white guy. I learned enough Spanish during these jobs to discover the difference between Palettes and Palitas (sp?).

Times are better now, but tough. I bought a modest home in 1999 and got in pretty cheap. But still intermittent work makes for intermittent mortgage payments. Finance companies frown on this behavior. So now I’ve been in one of those wonderful government programs known as Chapter 13. It was the only way left for me to keep my house when my mortgage company out of the blue decided to drop our payment arrangement and foreclose. In two months I would’ve been caught up on my mortgage, but I think they saw an opportunity to cash out on a house that’s half paid for. I would’ve been better off probably, if I had refinanced and brought my debt load back up to full.

And maybe that wouln't have been enough to push us into bankruptcy on it's own. But after my wife's near death experience from heart failure and $50,000 hospital bill, our options had run out. It was a good try though. :)

The US bankruptcy system, even before the new law went into effect, really sucks. It’s not the freeloader system it’s purported to be. It’s tough to get any expenses past the trustees, and they want to lowball everything. For instance, I’m allowed $50/month to keep my house in repair. Right now, I have a dead garbage disposal and my garage door no longer functions. It needs new gears and springs. So it’s manually operated for the next 3 years. There are a lot of other minor little things asking to be repaired, but they’ll just have to wait.

My wife, who suffers from high blood pressure, recently had another bad tooth. There’s no room in the budget for extra medical expenses, so she suffered until it was time to pull it. A little Orajel, a strong cord and it was done. We’ve paid for her doctor visits by selling stuff at the pawn shop. We’re lucky to have stuff to sell. The amount of money we’re allowed to deduct for her medical expenses covers her medication, but the infrequent doctor visits aren’t accounted for.

We have 2.5 years left of this, and then we can concentrate on paying off the house. I have a great job now that pays pretty well. But for now I must be punished for the declining economy that Bush and Greenspan built.

I truly feel for those who are forced into the stricter bankruptcy system by Hurricane Katrina. I wish the best for them.