Financial Discouragement

I've mentioned to several people how I feel that our current financial difficulties are probably a blessing, forcing us to re-evaluate our budget and trim down to what feels like survival levels.  This has motivated me to go through and check all of our monthly services to see if they merit their respective costs.  It's also given me motivation to begin selling off items we don't have much use for any more, which is great for simplifying, as well as some additional cash.

This morning was a difficult part of the journey.  We've already come to grips with our garage door opener being broken, and since the cost was several hundred dollars to fix, and we're not in a place where that makes sense, I purchased a manual garage door lock, to install myself:



This has worked, though it's been a frustrating change, from easy push button access from the car to getting out and struggling with a challenging to open door.  Well this morning Brooke was getting ready to go work out and asked me to open the garage door for her.  It wouldn't budge.  I finally figured out that the garage door spring had snapped, snapping the attached cables as well, and damaging the door.  We're now back to the place where it's several hundred dollars to fix, except now that price is just to get back to opening by hand.

The past 18 months has been an extremely frustrating time, which is the only way I know how to describe it.  It feels bad, but honestly, I still have an excellent, high pay job that I enjoy, so I'm still extremely blessed.  Yet I'm in a financial hole that seems at times to be impossible to get out of.  It feels unfair that as we are trying very hard to work our way out of this hole, more poop seems to be flung in on top of us, in what feels like rapid succession.

So if the take-away from large debt is downsizing, perhaps the steady trickle of medium to large scale financial setbacks is going to bring about a better perspective, increased patience, or maybe reliance on God for our financial well being.  I don't know yet.  For now, I'm going to get more serious about pursuing additional work, as well as seeking to reduce our auto insurance, encourage Brooke to use our HSA for all medical expenses, and come up with a food plan that may save us some money.  I'll detail the food plan next, as I feel this is particularly difficult, and lacking good online examples.