Ahhhh how pretty! The first flowers of the season. We don't have any daffodils or crocuses or tulips blooming yet, bu they are breaking thru the ground, so it wont be long. These beauties I picked at my daughters college, 2 weeks ago. She goes to school 3 hours south of us and 3 hours south is all it takes to make a huge difference in the weather. It is several degrees warmer there all the time and they have alot less snow. The winters are alot milder! So they get to see springs beauty before we do. I picked a few of these daffodils to bring home to enjoy. They lasted almost 5 days.

April is financial aid package month

So here we go!! My youngest daughter has been accepted now by 6 colleges and the final choice will be hugely influenced by which school offers her the best financial aid pkg. April 1 is typically the start date of when most colleges start mailing out their offers. So in the next couple of weeks are mail box will start being flooded by mail from all of these schools and we should soon have a better picture of where she will end up going to school. I know she is excited and also worried, as shes pretty sure her first and maybe even her second picks aren't going to offer the best deal, they are private colleges and they typically just don't offer as much aid. But we sill soon know. are you waiting for financial aid packages in your homes as well??

Cobra update

Awhile back I wrote a post about Cobra coverage and I was excited that the administration had passed as part of the stimulus pkg, a deal where the govt would fund 65% of cobra payments for a 9 mos period. The hopes was to allow more unemployed families, the chance to afford the Cobra coverage and give families health insurance while they were looking for a new job and new health insurance coverage. I was really excited about it, as it sounded like it was going to be a big help to us. With us paying 35% of the cost our health insurance, this was going to be alot cheaper than what I was paying as an employee. I unfortunately worked for a company where the costs had been steadily rising for years and the company had been passing the extra costs off to the employees and the employer was paying for less and less, of the health care costs for us. I was paying almost $800.00 a month for medical, dental and vision care for the family. With the cobra plan and the 35% option for 9 months I am looking at $470.00. So sounded like something we couldn't pass up on. When I first talked to my previous employer, the plan had just passed into law and they didn't have all of the details yet. They now have more details and while this may still be a good deal for us, it will mean a huge outlay of money to get it started and I wonder if the govt thought of that when they put this into place. Most unemployed families are not going to have the money to get this plan rolling.





The plan started March 1, so I would get 9 mos of coverage at 35% thru the end of November. I was laid off in January and lost my health insurance coverage on 1-31-09. I had to till 4-1-09 to mail in my initial application requesting that I wanted to continue with the cobra coverage. I have till 5-13-09 to get the first payment premium paid. The first payment premium though covers all of the in between months. So I owe for Feb, March, April and May when the first payment goes in. I know Cobra is continuation of coverage but since we had only one small medical bill in February, at this time it seems crazy to go back and pay for months of coverage that have all ready passed and we have used nothing, but that's not the way cobra works.





So February would be calculated at the full premium price, march, April and May at the 35% cost. And so forth. Ok this is a better health insurance deal for us, but that's still a heck of alot of money to outlay at one time, when you are unemployed. Oh but wait, when I called in to ask a few final questions when I was mailing in my initial application to continue with Cobra, I was told some more happy news. I should have known there would be another speed bump to get over. Turns out since this is such a huge undertaking to get this plan implemented by Cobra, that the govt gave them several months to get the plan working. Which means they say they needed time to get their selves up and running with the new program. Hmmmm.... So what that means to me and everyone else, is this. If you are trying to get yourself onto this plan now, you are going to have to jump thru a few more hoops financially to get onto this plan, than say someone who gets laid off later, in this year. So Cobra tells me it will be June by the time they have a new system up and running and are able to bill people at the correct 35% rate. SO they are allowed to, by law, collect the normal full premium payments until that time. So I actually owe the full Cobra premium for the months of Feb, March, April, and May, when the first payment goes in. Then in June the system will be able to go back and calculate all of the money I have paid in and give me a 65% credit for the months of March, April and May, because I overpaid, which they will apply towards future monthly premiums or give you a refund if you decide to drop the coverage. So 4 mos at full cost is going to be over 5K!! to get started. While I realize that with all I will be overpaying upfront, that I will have enough in credit to pay for all of my insurance thru November, and I wont owe anything else until December, its the principal of the thing. Yes, in the end I will get the insurance for 9 mos at the 35% cost BUT at a large upfront cost. What unemployed family can afford 5k upfront? $470.00 a month is still alot when money is tight, but its sure a heck of alot more budgetable on a monthly basis.



Is this really what the govt was thinking when they started this plan??? Families that experieince lay offs after June and decide to get onto cobra will not have to go thru this mess, they will just auto start paying at the 35% rate, so thank goodness for that, but those of us now trying to get onto this and take advantage of this program are not being helped out financially at all!



I have no options, I either make the payment in May or I give up the Cobra option. So more thinking to be done. The application was sent in to at least keep the option open for us, so now I have until Mid May to decide, what to do.

Great deal!!!

I usually don't talk about my money saving ventures when I go grocery shopping, As I feel like an amateur compared to alot of you great deal finders and couponers! You guys are awesome and I have learned alot from you!! Anyway this deal I just had to mention though. My better half is a caffeine free Pepsi drinker. That is the only kind of pop he really drinks. In a pinch he will drink a sprite or a rootbeer but those are very few and far behind. Meijers had Pepsi product cubes ( 24pk) on sale for 2/10.00 this week plus I had 5-$1.00 off coupons ( I used 4). The deal only allowed 2 cubers per each purchase, so I had to use the self checkout lanes and ran 2 separate orders so that I could get 4 cubes of Pepsi. So after my coupons, my total was $8.00 for 2. That's like buying one getting one free at the normal price. You very rarely see pepsi on sale that cheap! I was very happy!

Sadness....

April usually brings to us a flurry of last minute craziness, non stop working around the clock and excitement, while we entered the last 2 weeks before the greenhouses would normally open for the season. But not this year.....

Unfortunately due to an insurmountable mountain of problems the greenhouses will not be opening this year. I have mentioned in several of my posts, that we have been struggling thru alot of problems and have had to make some very hard decisions that we haven't wanted to make. Alot of the decisions we had no say in and were forced to follow because of this darn partnership. If we had, had a crystal ball 2 years ago and had known that the business was being started right at the time, the recession was just getting ready to start, we never would have started it and had we also been able to look into that same crystal ball and seen into the future, to see all the problems that the greenhouses partner was going to bring to the table, we definitely never would have brought him into the equation. The business could have started without this partner, he wasn't needed financially and he was brought in for reasons that really seem dumb now, but that's that 20/20 hindsight thing and there is nothing we can do to change, what has all ready happened. Even if the partner had never existed would the business be opening today, I don't know, I have a feeling the economy , the recession, the credit crunch etc., probably still would have been too much, of a strain, on a brand new business. But we could have closed up shop and waited for the storm to pass and tried to restart after the recession was over. But with a partner involved, and when a partnership goes horribly wrong, just as in a marriage that fails and goes into divorce, there are no winners. Things get split up, dissolved, assets are lost, etc etc. To completely dissolve this partnership and all ties to each other, the business had to cease to exist. So we can no longer use the same business name and everything that was the business will no longer be there. Its been a very hard time for my better half and I, lot of heartache and pain. We had put so much of ourselves into that business, personally, emotionally and financially and its all gone. We cant help but feel we have wasted 2 years of our lives with this venture.

But I also strongly believe everything happens for a reason and even though I cant see any good reasons for what we have had to struggle thru, I know that there is a reason. Somehow this will make us stronger and better and we will find a better path us and our nursery/greenhouse business.

I had mentioned in one other post and will mention it again, if you go into business with anyone, think long and hard about it, make sure you know that partner inside and out. I don't care if they are your best friend, a family member, or just a business acquaintance. You don't want surprises after you have entered into the partnership and its too late to get out. Make sure that all partners have the same work ethics, and goals for the business. That both partners are committed 100%. Make sure you have an iron clad contract between the partners, detailing exactly what is expected from each side of the partnership,including work hours, and financial cash flow into the business by each partner, so that when one partner doesn't uphold their end of the bargain you have some type of legal recourse. It makes for a very bitter situation when one side of the equation is doing 95% of the work and has put all of the cash flow into the business and the other side is making excuses for why they arent following thru on what they promised to bring to the table. It wasn't supposed to be that way. We take all blame for bringing the partner into this mess and we have to deal with the consequences of that and the losses we have incurred because of a very, very bad business decision. But to be fair the business probably still would have suffered because it was too new,when the recession struck. So now we are left with cleaning up the mess.

Ok enough wallowing in the mud, we know what went wrong and now we have to fix it, and like all divorces extricating yourself from a partnership is a long and painful process. So it will be a while yet before we can officially say its over.

New game plan. Stay tuned. I will outline more over the next few days.

April at last!!!

We made it!! Another winter has come and gone. We are pretty much seeing temps in the 50's now, but mother nature still likes to remind us its not quite time yet for really warm weather. We are seeing alot of up and down temps and alots of windy and rainy days as well. But we all know it wont last too much longer and it wont be long now before we can put those winter coats way back in the back depths of our closets and forget all about them and move onto our spring jackets. Ahhhh flip flops and shorts cant be too far away now!!!!

Spring breaks are over

The last 2 weeks have been full of kids. The college freshman was home for 10 days and then as soon as she went back to college, the youngest daughter, in high school, was on spring break. So this has been the first week that things have started to settle back into a normal pattern, as normal as can be possible, for us at the time. It was very nice to spend time with the girls and try to forget about the trying times we have been going thru. The girls have all grown up so fast and its hard to believe that 2 of them will be in college next year! My oldest daughter gave us a surprise this week as well! She and her husband are coming home for a visit this summer! By the time she gets here it will have been 111 months since I last saw here. So we are all very excited about this!!!