Wednesday, May 23, 2007

One Day At A Time

Well I guess that I should fill you all into what has actually been happening in my life recently. Me and mine have been fairly busy as we attempt to adjust to our new home as well as new jobs, not to mention the simple fact alone that I’ve had to adjust to the fact that I was actually returning to work after such a long period of time off!

With my arm being in the shape that it is now in, coupled with the fact that I had pretty much burned myself out doing tech support just prior to my leaving my job last year, I knew that once the decision had been made for me to return to work that I was going to have to have some form of plan in order for me to be able to try something completely different.

Well, I am pretty confident that I’ve succeeded way beyond my wildest dreams in this particular area.

So please bear with me a little bit. Yes, Jim and I have been doing great with our recovery and MMT, and we certainly are no longer spending the shocking amounts of money that we had been just a year and a half ago. By some sort of miracle we have also managed to dig ourselves out of a pretty deep hole and are no longer in debt. Period. Full stop. Yet, at the same time, we also found ourselves struggling to make any significant financial headway. I know that a combination of events somewhat sabotaged us - my arm breaking didn’t help but it did pretty much result in us having only one provider which just happened to occur at the same time that we experienced another adult sized person joining our family. Yikes. At least we managed to stay afloat.

This situation certainly was fine for the short term but I was beginning to find the whole thing somewhat untenable. Each time I came back from looking at the size of apartment that ideally I wanted in a luxury high rise, the more frustrated everything became. Realistically we were going to have to pay approx $1500 plus on average each month for what I wanted. That amount seemed pretty far out of my reach for the immediate future. Or was it? One day I had a magical and utterly brilliant idea.

Jim and I own a 23 unit, three story walk up apartment building about a half an hour out of town and have owned it since December 2000. This is to be our Freedom 55 as the mortgage will more or less be paid of by then so that when we “retire” we’ll have 23 units multiplied by whatever the rent will be then all to ourselves - less any monthly operating costs, etc. Currently Jim also draws a monthly salary from this business and does the lion’s share of any work required which ends up averaging approx 15 days per month give or take. We also pay one of our tenants a small monthly stipend to keep an eye on everything as we don’t actually reside at the property.

From here, I more or less expanded my idea in the hopes that we could apply - and hopefully get hired - to some of the more desirable high rise apartment buildings in London for the position of Building Manager. I ended up spending a good six plus months researching the various property management companies as well as the types of properties that each company owned. I finally narrowed our choices down to three although I was a little bit unsure of my third choice. As it so happened, we actually got hired by my number one choice so you can well imagine how utterly excited and happy I was. Jim and I are now Building Managers of the property in the photo above this entry.

We started our jobs exactly 12 days ago so we are very much newbies to this particular experience. When I was doing my research, I based my choices on said company’s properties with no actual knowledge of what kind of renumeration that would be offered. As it turns out, this company not only has spectacular buildings, they also have a renumeration package beyond compare.

As well as receiving a three bedroom, two full bathroom 1425 square foot apartment valued at $1500 per month, the company also pays for all of our utilities, telephone, cable, internet and newspaper delivery daily at our doorstep. In three months, we will also have a full benefit package. Our starting salary is $36 000 with a raise also in three months and from then on, a raise on an annual basis. On our third day of employment, I received a call from their main office advising me that our computer was ready for pickup!

I sure am hard pressed to find too many more companies like this one! Of course, I’m sure that you are all thinking that there has to be a catch somewhere and I don’t blame anyone for thinking that either. I sure as heck was waiting nervously for the other shoe to drop so to speak and as of today, I’m still waiting. All of their employees are long term ones with the average length of time with them approx ten years. The only reason that they even had an opening was that they had just completed building a brand new sixteen story building.

Wow, eh? What absolutely blows my mind right now is that we no longer have any bills at all to pay. I asked Jim what I was going to do with my daytimer from now on…That’s not an absolute truth as we still have to pay $300 total each month for our methadone but this too shall disappear in less than three month’s time now. Cool n’est pas?

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