Frustrations

Before I really get into all of this, let me start by saying that I am actually not depressed right now & I am handling everything pretty well. That said, life has been beyond difficult for us lately. The important things in life are fine. We have two beautiful children, we're all healty & we have tons of family & friends who love us & support us. Everything else though? Not going so well.

I still can't really go into any of the details on our house, but it's not looking promising. I really don't want to say too much, but it's huge & going to affect us in a big way & we have no idea what is going to happen. Life feels pretty out of control when your house is worth $300K less than waht you owe on it & is literally falling to pieces around you.

The other really huge thing that's causing us major concern is the stupid, stupid condo that we own. It was Edward's condo before we got married. For the record, I didn't really want him to buy it in the first place because I really hate the neighborhood that it's in & the complex itself isn't all the great. But he insisted it was a great investement. When we bought the house, I wanted him to sell it, and he thought we should hang onto it & rent it. I agreed because it was technically his condo, but it was yet another bad decision that we made. It ended up sitting vacant for almost 8 months before we rented it out & now it's worth about $150K less than what we owe on it. To top it off, our tenant hasn't paid us since May and now refuses to move out. California law favors the tenant, so we just paid a lawyer a $2,500 retainer to start the process to get her out of there. We figured we could try to do it ourselves, but one little mistake could end up costing us. Seriously so annoyed right now! Why does she get to be a deadbeat & live for free when we have to pay the mortgage on the place still?

As I said before though, I'm hanging in there. I realize how lucky we are to just be healthy & happy & we'll bounce back from these things eventually. We both still have our jobs & we're still able to afford for me to work just part time. If things keep going this way, I may end up having to go back to work full time, but if that does happen, it's not the worse thing that could happen to us.

I do feel a bit like life is kicking us financially when we've only ever made responsible decisions & have tried our best to make the right decisions for our family & our future. But we're young & we will come out of this eventually. It can be challanging to fight the tears some days, but I know that everything is out of my hands right now & I just can't waste energy worrying or getting depressed. I'm angry & frustrated more than anything.