Ebbs and Flows

The hubster and I went through finances last night and it was not really an enjoyable experience.  Being on this self-employed journey is a wild ride.  My real estate business is actually doing pretty well, but in order to grow it I keep reinvesting the money.  To protect my lenders, I keep 20% of the funds in each deal from my own cash.  That way if any money is lost, it's my money and I'm still able to pay them back.  So as I ramp up the number of houses, the amount of my personal cash reserve has to grow as well.  I'm currently taking a salary of $50,000, but that's about half of what our expenses are, which means I have to supplement by either taking a chunk out at each house sale or using my real estate commissions.  Luckily, they've been about enough to cover the difference, but it's still a very uncertain thing.  The flip side is to cut down our expenses, which we're also doing, but health insurance, mortgage payments, utilities and daycare are around $5,500/month.  Plus we have to eat and drive for our jobs.  So there's a floor there we can't go below, even if we were ridiculously amazing and had zero discretionary spending.  And I'm not ridiculously amazing.

I guess because I feel confident in my business, the conversation didn't really stress me out.  MS yelling at me because HE was stressed out definitely did rile me up a little, but I'm over it.  We'll figure this out, and we always have an escape plan (put those mechanical engineering degrees back to work).  Freaking health insurance.