Trimming Back

It's the start of another week – and it's a very frigid week! My stars, it's cold out there! We finally had a bit of snow over the weekend. I don't think we had enough to measure at any point, but there was enough to be slick yesterday morning. It's a good thing hubby enjoys soup, because that's about all I want to cook in this kind of weather. I will say, though, I'll take the cold weather over all the snow and ice they got across a lot of the rest of the country. I felt sorry for those NFL players yesterday when they got face-planted in the snow and came up with it packed inside their helmets.

We've reached a somewhat sad milestone on our journey of unemployment – The End. Hubby gets his final payment this week, and I get mine next week. Somewhere in the middle hubby got a double payment one week and that's why he finishes first. But Christmas is almost taken care of (one backordered item will be billed when it ships, but it's under $15), as well as the winter birthdays.

With one eye on The End and the other eye on the just-paid property taxes, we both came up with the same question for one another last week: Why are we keeping two vehicles when we only use one? And neither one of us had a reasonable answer for the question. We mulled it over a couple of days, and the more we thought about it the more we agreed we didn't need both vehicles. We knew son was needing a more reliable vehicle for his wife to drive for work – as an on-call counselor, she drives a lot of hours at night traveling to different hospitals to assess the mental health of patients in the ER. She definitely needs reliable transportation. Now she has it.

We drove to KC yesterday to deliver the vehicle. We took our time, enjoyed lunch on the way – and I enjoyed my final time of remote-starting a vehicle to warm it up and also using the heated seats. That may be the part I miss most! By the time we got home last night, I realized that I had a feeling of being liberated.....saving around $300 a year on property taxes, plus $55 a month on insurance. Add to that $27.50 a year on tags, plus gas and upkeep. With that one move, I saved us a bundle!

I really hadn't thought that I'd feel this positive about letting go of my vehicle. But the reality is that we don't need two vehicles, and that's going to add up to a huge savings for us. You know, it's just what you get used to. And I'm looking at things now and realizing how many “cushy” things I'd become used to that I can do without now that we're not working. Being unemployed can be a learning experience – and a re-learning experience. I'd spent 50 years of my life pinching pennies, so I definitely know how to do it. I'm grateful for the time that it wasn't so necessary for me.

We know that we're very fortunate in our state of unemployment compared to a lot of people. We are older and have fewer bills than a lot of people. We don't have kids at home. I've enjoyed going shopping over the past few years – but I can be just as happy curling up with a good book to read from the public library. In the big picture we're both pretty low maintenance, and I think we're both pretty realistic about seeing where we can cut corners financially.

So, here we are, off on yet another phase of our unemployment......probably now we're truly at the point where we can call ourselves retired instead of unemployed – without looking over our shoulders to make sure nobody working with Unemployment hears us!!