I am a work-at-home, multi-tasking, wife and mother of three. I currently own my own medical transcription business (that is kinda stale right now), have a full-time job (for the insurance), 2 part-time jobs (for the income that is lost with my insurance premiums) and have now decided to start blogging (which thankfully is free as I have no time for another job..hehe). To say I have no time is putting it mildly. My motto is to never put all your eggs in one basket. I have made a New Year's resolution to slow down. Now I just have to figure out which eggs to throw away.
My family is absolutely the best and understand all my craziness. My husband is a wonderful cook and cooks most of the time. My 2 oldest kids are great about helping me keep the house in order. My youngest is real good at making the house look lived in (to the oldest kids dismay right after they have straightened up). Life is good.
We lost our jobs about 10 years ago thanks to NAFTA (thank you Bill Clinton). This area of the country relied heavily on manufacturing. Sewing factories kept everyone fed and clothed and happy. Our jobs all went to Mexico (thank you Gap) and everyone around here all lost their jobs, right at Christmas too...great. Fortunately, the government felt bad for everyone and did pay for those of us who wanted to go to college to learn a new trade. I took advantage of it and learned medical transcription. My husband also took advantage of it and is now an HVAC business owner. Thankfully, we were young enough to go back to school. There are so many around here that had age against them and didn't go.
I decided after about 5 years of being a medical transcriptionist that I wanted to become an owner of a company. Nothing big...I just wanted my own clients. I did A LOT of research and finally took the plunge and did it. My clients were all what you call third-party clients as getting an actual physician is not as easy as one would think. So many of them are wanting it done so cheap because they can send it to India as they will do it so much cheaper. The third party clients I could get don't pay enough and when I hired someone to do the work I am only making peanuts and not enough to even make a living on and pay my bills. I was never comfortable just quitting my full-time job, thankfully, as I need the insurance. Although it seems that the insurance rates have gone out of this world and the benefits they give you have gone down. We have a $6000/year deductible for the 5 of us. We get to pick from a $6000, 10,000 or 25,000 deductible/year at my work and that is even Blue Cross/Blue Shield. Once you pay your deductible then everything is covered 100%, which is wonderful if you are planning on having major surgery or something when you would actually use a $6000 deductible. Oh yeah, the premium is costing me over $800 a month...A MONTH. Someone is getting rich and is sure in the heck isn't me. Anyway, that has caused me to have to get a second job part time and I just recently started working on a second part time (and third total) job. This one is a second shift and super early morning job four days a week. It gets a little hard keeping them all straight sometimes as each one has me working on several clients a day. This leaves me no time for my family, which is the whole reason for all the crazy working to begin with. Oh, I miss the days of working in the factory 40 hours a week and getting the weekend (and sometimes Friday afternoon) off to spend with the family. We went to work 7-3:30, were home by 4 and had the whole evening off. Those were the days!
Anyway, kinda got off track giving you a little background on me.....
My New Year's resolution, as I said before, is to slow down. This blog is going to be my documentation of doing just that. I have so many recipes that I want to try and so many places I want to go. Heck, just having 2 days off in a row would be wonderful. The economy has hit everyone in the US no matter race, age or financial status. We are what one would call middle class. Just the 5 of us going out to eat anymore (which we used to do quite often just a few years ago) has gotten to be too expensive that we have had to pull back on it some. It has hit everywhere and no one is safe. Even if you have lots of money you see that the price of all your things has gone up. Groceries are even getting crazy.
Grab yourself a cup of coffee, your favorite pjs, curl up on the couch and lets make the world a better place to live...one blog at a time. Hope everyone has a good evening and I'll see you tomorrow. You can also visit me at http://coffeeandpjs.webs.com
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