2012 Already?

So here it is. Late January 2012. Where did the last 6 months go? Geez.

Things with our property we rent out are good. We had a scare after my last post as our tenants had broken up and there was uncertainty about what they were going to do. They've since worked through the break up and seem to be doing wonderfully. As for the financial aspect of being a landlord, it's starting to level out. With Christmas thrown into the fiasco and spending smartly and considerably less, I'm finally leveling out.

I did two weeks of travel for work in November that left me super exhausted. It didn't help that the first conference stressed me out so bad that I ended up with an extremely painful muscle spasm in my neck the second day into a 4.5 day conference. We were in an amazing location and hotel and I didn't enjoy a minute of it. Thankfully, I got 36 hours at home before the next conference and was able to medicate up to get the spasm to release a bit. Trip #2 was in a location I had never been and I had a great time. I spent the down time hanging out by myself and enjoying the location and all it offered.

We don't normally do big vacations with the kidlets. Long weekends mostly. Last year we went to the Smokey Mountains for the better part of a week during fall break in October. This year, we decided the kids were old enough to do Disney. We are going during Spring break for the entire week. The best part is that Soldier has been saving up some and because we are a military family, the discounts are amazing and ones we are taking full advantage of. Our tax return should also be decent sized since we had a lot of repairs last year and we get those back 100%. I wasn't very excited before about going and was dragging my feet about doing any research but am now really looking forward to it.

What else....gosh, nothing that exciting really. I contemplated going back to school and send requests to a few schools known for the program I was interested in for more info and almost immediately they started harassing me with phone calls and emails. And none sent me more information on the program so I could choose wisely. I told them all 'no thank you' and have put the thought of school on the back burner. I need to do something because I've got $13k in student loans and one year into an Associates. I think I need to sit down with an actual career counselor to get better direction. Because at 38, I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up.

Shopping with a 7 year old Mad Hatter

I do believe I've created a monster in my sweet 7 year old daughter. As a baby, I dressed her in bright colors and never dresses. She just wasn't a 'dress' baby. She wore denim overalls, camoflauged pants and hiking boots. About the age of 4 we would let her choose her own clothes and when shopping, allowed her to choose between pre-chosen options.

When entering Kindergarten, we allowed her to make her daily clothing choices. The ladies outside of her school would look forward to her arrival in the mornings to see what kind of outfit she had put together. She often chose colors and prints that never matched. I always made sure her tights were unusual and her shoes, while keeping them inexpensive, were on the trendier side. She adored her headbands and hair bows and was always accessorized. She refused to wear an 'outfit' like the other girls in her class.

Now, she's still the same way. She's changed from tights to leggings. Won't wear an 'outfit' and still chooses to put colors and patterns together that one wouldn't normally choose. We take her shopping and allow her to pick out her own clothes. She has more costume jewelry than one her age should have and plenty of headbands, flower clips and sparkly things for her hair. Her pocketbook holds several chapsticks or girly lipgloss purchased from stores like Libby Liu (I think this is how this is spelled).

While some moms I know think I'm giving my Mad Hatter to much leeway by allowing her to choose her clothes every day and not policing her outfits. As long as the clothes are clean, they fit and she's not inappropriately dressed for the season/activity/outing, I really don't care what she has on. I've taken her to the grocery in her full-on princess dress up including tiara and dress up shoes. She was dressed, clean and had shoes on. She was happy, I was happy, why start a battle over something so trivial?

We are the same way with 4 year old Chunky. He's a little more bull-headed in our direction. He'd rather wear jeans when it's sweltering hot and flip flops all year long. And he'll wear the same favored t-shirt daily if we'd let him.

Shopping with Mad Hatter is exhausting and time consuming. She wants everything but not what I want to buy. We went for new 'fashion' boots and walked out with an outfit as well. I had a coupon and the outfit was mostly on clearance. Chunky, on the other hand, generally wants toys when clothes shopping. And if he's in the mood for clothes shopping, he wants stuff that doesn't come in his size or shoes...which he doesn't need.

Tomorrow is closet and season change cleanout time. In their closets and mine. I'm very scared and what is going to remain. Closets will be as empty as my pocketbook is going to be. Floods and hoochie skirts are not approved in this house.

Being a landlord Part II

Something else I forgot to mention when trying to rent out your property...ask to be involved in every step of finding renters. Demand to be at the house when people walk through. Even if you walk out the door as they are walking in. You want to know what type of people are walking through your home. Also, ask to see the results of the background and credit check. Ask to see responses to personal and prior rental references. Demand to be the final say on who you will rent to and how much you want for rent. We didn't get to do this with our first tenant. If we had, we might have made a different decision. We would never discriminate on a situation EVER, but we'd have taken a harder and longer look at the financial situation. Cosigner or not.

Take pictures of everything in your home the day you release the property to the renter. EVERYTHING. When that renter moves out, take photos of EVERYTHING the day they fully vacate. Don't do anything, don't clean, do nothing. If you can be there the day the tenant vacates and can do an exit walkthrough, please do this. Document everything. Sign everything. Keep all receipts. If you can't be there, ask a close friend. If you have a property manager, ask them.

If you opt to try to find tenants and create a lease from online documents, talk with a lawyer who does landlord/tenant law. Ask them to create the lease for you or review the lease you want to use. As a landlord, you want to be fully covered legally in the event your tenant fails to pay rent, acquires pets you don't approve of/agree to or abandons the property and leaves it a mess. If you have to go after your tenant for back rent, eviction, etc., lawyer up. Do everything by the book. In most cases, if you have to seek legal help, the costs go back to the tenant. Be prepared in the event that it does not. Your lawyer should be able to help you understand what would be involved in the way of time and money.

If you've never used one, find a good CPA to help do your taxes. Ours gave us a worksheet so come tax time, we could send him everything he needs to complete our taxes. We can call him at any point to ask tax questions and we love that. He's been our tax guy for 10 years. There were so many things we forgot to track and submit for taxes. I started an excel file to track rental revenue, rental loss and all the different areas from the worksheet given to us. I notate if I have a receipt for the expense.

On a separate tab, I've created a worksheet for the actual tenant. I keep track of rent and the date it hits my account, late fees, property management fees, and then I track important conversations with dates and overview of conversation, reason for any large repairs, verbal agreements made with the tenant and reasons for non-payment of rent (if applicable). I also track dates of lease and then put a meeting request in my outlook calendar for 60 days before lease expiration (this is usually the time you can start showing the property for new tenants if your current tenants don't want to renew or you don't want to renew with the tenant).

If you, my fellow reader, have any tips and tricks to being a landlord that you find extremely helpful, please leave me a comment. I'd love to hear about them and share with others. If you are a tenant and have comments on how to be a better landlord, I'd love to hear and share them too. We are tenants as well, however I feel like even tho we live in a rental, we are treating it as if we own it because we'd want our tenants to treat our home the same way. But that's a whole other post on living in military housing.

Being a Landlord

Since the housing market wouldn't support what we needed to be able to sell our home, we had no other option but to rent the house. I had a really hard time coming to terms with that. We bought the house in 1999. Soldier and I had dated less than a year and I'd never bought a house. So much blood, sweat and tears went into this house. We got married, had two babies, created 10 years of our life in this house. We macked out the kitchen three years prior and I was so much in love with it. And we were in a great place financially.

We got what I thought was a great realtor to get the house rented for us. We just had to keep the house clean at that point. There was very little we had to do to get the house renter ready.

We talked many times with the realtor about property management or do we manage it ourselves from out of state. We figured it would be easy enough to manager ourselves. We knew a lot of tradespeople if work needed to be done and Soldier's parents live 10 minutes away if there was an emergency.

We got a tenant rather quickly and we adored them. Everything went well for some time. We knew the entire situation and I felt for them. I probably got to emotionally vested in them. I'm a generous person by nature and always want to give the benefit of the doubt. I think this was my downfall. I was to trusting and lenient. Our realtor wanted us to evict, but we knew we didn't have a legal leg to stand on. There was discussion about breaking the lease and because we knew the situation, we were willing to do whatever would make their situation easier.

Fast forward three months and we sent a letter asking for the final months rent and part of the expenses that were put out getting the house back in order. Maybe I worded it wrong, maybe my execution wasn't right, I don't know. We have a property manager for the tenants now and I ran this entire thing by her. She's been doing property management for years and I thought I was doing the right thing. She and my other voice of reason read through the letter and supporting documents and said everything looked OK and nothing was incorrectly stated based on the supporting documents I had.

What I received back in communication was heart stopping. I was being accused of things that never crossed my mind and things were said that I knew to not be true. I was angry, hurt, scared and mortified. I called Soldier and he went nuts. I called my voice of reason and she shared stuff with me to really make me thing about next steps. I called our property manager and she was totally miffed.

After much thought, discussion and trying to sleep on it, I decided to call a lawyer. We had a fantastic discussion and he assured me of some fears that I had. I feel much better about how we decided to proceed. I would advise new landlords to keep everything from receipts to texts to emails or other types of communication. Have everything in writing and signed by both sides if changes or arrangements outside of the lease have been made.

I will forever advise landlords to hire a property management company. We love ours and our property manager is amazing. She's a great buffer and gives us plenty to think about when making decisions about repairs and gives us her honest opinion about situations that come up. It's worth the monthly fee to have her. She's local, knows the neighborhood and has plenty of knowledge and experience.

Financially, I would advise new landlords to be wise in their spending. Just because the mortgage is or almost is being covered by rent, don't assume it's going to be that way. Always budget the mortgage in full just in case. I didn't and am scraping the barrel until October. My credit score fell over a hundred points and I'm late on everything. Soldier pays all the house bills and childcare since I pay for all things house. I hadn't been late making a mortgage payment in years. Now, I'm on a repayment plan because I was always a month behind since losing rent from when our first tenant vacated and had to put quite a bit of money into the house to get it ready to rent. The new tenants have been nickel and diming stuff and there's that cost. Those have pretty much stopped. I'm not spending money where it's not needed and staggering bills and makely barely the minimum payments just to stop the calls. If I could go back to this time last year and have a re-do with the knowledge I have now, I would. Hands down. I'd take the good, bad and ugly that came with regular life, but would do things different in regards to being a landlord. And unfortunately, our role as a landlord are not going to change anytime soon.

Military life, Military wife

After we received clearance that our on-post housing was ready, Soldier did the walk through, signed the lease and got the keys. He moved everything he had been using at the hotel into the house as well as whatever he thought we'd need from the storage facility he rented. Kids and I packed up what we had at Soldier's parents house and started the drive.

Saying goodbye to all of our wonderful friends and our forever home (we had a tenant at this point) was one of the hardest things, as a family, we've done. I was scared. Our safety net was completely gone. Everything was going to be brand new for our entire family. I'd never been to where we were moving. Never even been to the state. I knew nothing about full time military life. I was and probably still am completely ignorant about the etiquette of being a military wife.

As the schools here start very early in August, we opted to start the Mad Hatter in first grade after Labor Day. That gave us a week to unpack, find our way around and get settled. We had been able to get all the paperwork online, printed, filled out and submitted since Soldier had been 'living' here for about 6 weeks. And let me tell you, there was TONS of paperwork and forms. And nothing could be submitted online.

Soldier met us at the front gate so he could be sure we got through OK and then follow him to our home. Post has very strict speed zones and gnarly implications for getting tickets so Soldier made it VERY clear that obeying the speed zones is crucial.

Upon arriving to our new home, Soldier walked us around outside. Mind you, it was about 300 degrees and 100% humidity. Nothing like where we came from. The grass here was pretty brown and pokey. Everything was a bit droopy and it was very quiet.

We came in the front door and I was really rather surprised. The entire home had been freshly painted a modern neutral color. The floors were parquet hardwood. Kitchen and bathroom were a linoleum. It was a far cry from our forever home but I was a bit excited to get our household items and furniture so we could settle in. Those came about 3 days after we arrived. It was bean bag chairs, inflatable mattresses and sleeping bags until then.

It's been a few days over one year. I still miss my forever home with the gorgeous kitchen, windows that aren't drafty and carpet. We are comfortable here and settled. I can't really complain. Much. I know more about our new neighbors of a few weeks than I do the neighbors that we met the day after we moved in.

I have no female relationships at all here. Soldier and I haven't had a date night since moving here. We don't have a sitter and finding one who doesn't come recommended from someone we know isn't much of an option since we don't really 'know' anyone that we mesh with well.

But I'm not complaining. Soldier comes home every night. Mad Hatter is doing well in the second grade and Chunky started Pre-K and is writing his name and doing really well.

Depression is for real

About two weeks after having kidney surgery, Soldier told me there was a possibility we'd be moving to Kentucky. In general conversation about our day. Not what I wanted to hear. Over the course of the week, it went from maybe to absolutely to date to be decided. We knew Soldier was clear to go in November so we thought we had plenty of time to make some decisions. We had a house to think about.

I don't know how much time had passed but they wanted Soldier to report in July versus November. At that point, we had maybe two months to wrap things up. We had ten years of our life to pack up, two kids to prepare to move (which they'd never done before) and say goodbye to our lives. I had so much anxiety, fear and every other emotion. To add to that, I had decided to go back to school and started the same day I went back to work. Total masochistic move.

We packed up everything we wanted, sold or donated everything we didn't. Soldier moved down in July and the kids I were going to follow around Labor Day. We opted to live on post and hadn't cleared housing so it didn't make much sense or seem fair for us to all live in a hotel. Kids had their schedule, I had mine. All was well....until I caught some mutation of a cold.

I had been rather weepy up to that point anyway. I was moving out of my forever home, away from everything we knew and away from my precious circle of girlfriends. We were going into unchartered territory and I wasn't ready. This cold took a lot out of me. I was emotionally exhausted from being separated from Soldier and trying to get everything wrapped up on the house, physically exhausted from being a single parent and still working through the post surgery recovery and tapped out as work was super busy.

I went to the doctor because I was feverish and my throat was so swollen. I sat there forever and was a hot mess. Finally my doc walked by and said 'Are you still here?' at which time I just started sobbing and couldn't stop. She held my hand and waited for the crying jag to finish and then asked what was wrong. Everything just came flowing out. My concerns on recovery, I didn't feel good, I was emotional all the time about moving and couldn't stop the crying once it started. I was exhausted all the time and just felt dreary and drab. I had no desire to hurt myself or anyone else. I just felt like I was in a gray world and couldn't find the color again.

She gave me a prescription to take. It was an anti-depressant that was kidney friendly. She put me on the lowest dose to try for two weeks and then wanted me back. After two weeks I couldn't believe the difference. I don't know if was the meds or if it was because I was feeling better and seeing progress with our move/coming to terms with the move. My doc bumped the dosage up one step and asked me to come back the week we were set to move.

I'm not one to ask for help but in this case, I knew when I couldn't control my emotions I had to do something. With the meds and withdrawing from school after my classes ended helped tremendously. I continued with them until about 3 months after we moved. I had a great relationship with our new primary care on post and after a great conversation with him, we agreed to a weaning process to be reevaluated after 4 weeks.

Weaning off this anti-depressant wasn't what I thought. I followed the protocol and had lots of dizziness for several weeks. It all passed and I still felt great. I was in control of my emotions again and was ecstatic. I tried finding positive in the move and learning about the area and living the true 'military life'. And it helped that we were able to get 'home' rather often.

I've heard people say depression is a cop out or a figment of one's imagination. I completely understand there are different levels of depression and certain stressors can set it off. I don't think people should go along to get along thinking it will pass. There are many levels of help and some involve medication. One shouldn't be embarrassed to be medicated. It made me a happier person without it being a medicated happy (stoned). And it doesn't have to be permanent. I see my doc regularly for labs and he always asks how things are going since going off the meds. I won't hesitate to say something if I feel like things are slipping.

How I saved a life...

OK, I swore I'd blog more but the time just gets away from me. Let's rewind to March 2010. After 3 days of testing at Mayo in January, it was determined I was a match for JC as a kidney donor. Surgery was scheduled for March 11th. The night before I was not able to eat after 7pm and had to drink a nasty concoction. My nerves pretty much could have done the same thing. I was up around 3:30am as I had to shower with some soap that left me a bit yellow. My dad, JB, JC, JC's husband, Soldier and I piled into JC's truck and headed for the hospital. Instead of worrying about surgery, I was worried the nasty concoction would rear it's head on the way. Can I just say that stuff is brutal. Anyway, we get checked in and taken up to the floor for vitals and changed into the gowns and the hot white surgical stockings. The no underwear policy grossed me out. Ick. They bagged up our clothes for respective husbands to take and kept our glasses to have moved to our rooms. The nurse told JC and I it was time so we gave out hugs and kisses, grabbed hands and walked towards the pre-op room. Oddly enough, neither one of us were really scared or freaked out.

The nurses there were so nice. They put us on gurney's, mine being the Cadillac and JC's being the Prius. After looking at charts and bands, we had to switch. We changed the sheets while the nurses fretted around. JC and I joked the entire time and had the staff laughing with us or looking at us like we were freaks. We had a team come and put IV's in, talk to us about anesthesia and met with the surgeons. After awhile they said it was time to part, so we hugged and kissed best we could and said 'see ya later'. I still wasn't very nervous about surgery. Still more nervous about the concoction working it's way through my system.

The operating room was just like I thought. Small, sterile, white and freezing. It had the steel double doors and I asked if that's where they would go through with my kidney and they said yes. The anesthesiologist (sp?) looked exactly like Apolo Ono. Smoking hot...

Everyone is doing their thing and we are all talking about Chicago restaurants. Which ones are the best, who had been to what ones. Nice banter. They put the mask on my face and I immediately couldn't breathe. Before I could say 'is this thing on', I was out.

I vaguely remember my name being called and crying. I vaguely remember asking for Soldier. Apparently I asked for cupcakes (JC and I were talking about cupcakes in pre-op). I woke up in my hospital room somewhat groggy but feeling OK. I didn't have any pain that I could remember, no nausea and no headache. I clearly remember having the worst dry mouth ever. I slept a lot that first day. They did want me to eat something so I ordered fresh fruit. The smell, I remember, made me feel icky so I didn't eat it. I did have some Sprite and lots of ice water.

The nurses came to get me out of bed early evening I guess. My aunt and cousin had driven to the hospital to see us and brought each of us girlz a crocheted lap blanket, I love this blanket BTW. I got my legs over the side of the bed and started to feel a bit of pain and was worried my guts were going to fall out. I hadn't looked under my gown to see what my stomach looked like. The nurses grabbed an arm and Soldier stood behind. I stood up, got woozy and gagged. After throwing up gallons of water, crying because I was absolutely certain my guts were spewing out, I felt like a rock star. My room was in a cul-de-sac of sorts so they walked me around the circle a few times. I was in some pain, but it felt good to be moving.

After being settle into bed, Soldier said something about my urine output being almost non-existent. I was drinking TONS of fluids, had an IV giving me fluids and nothing. Low and behold, I went into a full blown panic attack. I was afraid my remaining kidney seized and wasn't working and I was surely going to die. The nurse shot me up with Adtivan (sp?)and I went right to sleep.

I spent another day and a half in the hospital and was released. JC had a bit harder time walking around and was much more tired, but she was released a day and a half after I was. We stayed in a local hotel for recovery. I was advised to stay 7 days, JC had to stay 30 days. We recovered together by walking around the hospital, taking short trips to Target for a change of scenery, learning about her med schedule and resting.

Today, if you put our labs side by side with no names, you wouldn't know which one of us they belonged to. We both feel amazing and I feel nothing different. JC said she feels more alive.

THAT is how I saved a life. By donating my left kidney, I have my sister with me. Her husband has his wife. Their son has his mom. My parent's have their daughter. My children have their aunt. I would do it again in a hot minute.