I know times are not good — I can’t really say they are bad because for me they aren’t. I’ve had worse and know from what I read in the news that there is MUCH worse out there.

There was a time when this economic downturn would have had a more significant impact on us that it has.

Yes, my power bill is higher and it costs me more to get to work. Some weeks are pretty tight money-wise, but we have survived the worst of it so far.I’m just superstitious enough to worry that my saying this is going to jinx it for us.

Ken was able to trim a significant part of our budget by getting a competitive auto insurance quote and while we hated leaving the company we had been with for 15 years, it was just too big a gap to ignore. Other tweaks here and there on things made a big difference.

While it may not have been the smartest move according to the financial experts, we borrowed money from our 401K’s to pay off some credit card debt. And then cut up the cards that were paid off. I know my credit score has gone up over 20 points since then — oh not all at once — it’s taken it a good 6 months to do that, but having paid off the high interest rate cards, now I have more money available to pay the other, lower interest cards and making those higher monthly payments has contributed to that credit score improvement.

Neither of us have had a pay raise. And his overtime hours were cut back drastically there for several months.

We did scale back on dog shows this year. But managed to finish two despite that cut-back. We still have 3 that we’re working on titles for and it’s highly likely we won’t finish them this year, but they are young so it’s OK.

So it’s not like we haven’t made sacrifices.

But, things are looking up. Ken’s overtime is gradually coming back and since he scaled back to “regular time” income, he’s using that extra to pay down things like the house and cars. My new boss mentioned that he’s looking into pay raises for those of us in IT — it’s only been 3 years since my last one — but until that’s a reality, I’m not counting those chickens. It’s just nice to contemplate.

And my work is wide open. The recession has actually helped my company gain business. We’ve hired nearly 20 new technicians as our customer base has expanded and as we gain even more, we continue to look for qualified personnel.

I personally have more projects on my plate than I can handle right now.

It’s nice to say I have light at the end of the tunnel.

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