Tax time

So it's been a day or two since I posted. Things are good here. God has been blessing us and providing as always. I'm not going to lie - money has been CRAZY tight. Winter in general is always a little pinched just because work slows down at my husband's commission based job. And with Christmas and New Year's Day his check(s) for those weeks always take a hit because they get a flat amount for the day that is always smaller than they would have made on a normal day. 

Winter 2011-12 had some unexpected blessings. In late 2011 Nick and I shot a wedding together, which was $1200. Also in late 2011 Nick totaled his car, which was paid off, and we got an unexpectedly large check from the insurance for it. And when I was in the hospital, one of my very favorite blogger friends sent us a Christmas card with some surprise cash inside, right when we needed it (she was one of my very favorite bloggers even before that ;)). Then, when we filed our income taxes for 2011, we got back a nice tax refund. And just a few weeks after that we unexpectedly got some extra money back from our home insurance on our roof replacement.

But Winter 2012-13 has been harder than most, and certainly harder than last winter. To start with, his pay for the year was almost $5,000 less in 2012 than in 2011, just due to the available work. Most of that shortage was the last quarter of 2012. This was also the first year since we went to one income that Kate and Will didn't send us a nice big check for Christmas. Not, of course, that they owed it to us or anything, but let's be real, it always really helped, and we definitely felt the lack of it this year. And of course we've had an extra person to feed, clothe, and diaper this year.

All of these things combined to take us to the point where we've not just been struggling to keep everything less than 30 days past due, but occasionally writing a check we couldn't cover, because the bill had to be paid and letting the bank's overdraft protection kick in, something we HATE doing. That said, we've  certainly not gone hungry, and many times, just when we didn't know what to do, God has sent just what we needed, whether it was a sudden request for Nick to work on someone's car, or a sale in my Etsy shop, or a photography client buying a larger CD than they originally planned to, or my mom slipping me $20 for gas at church, or my parents showing up with a pack of toilet paper, a gallon of milk, and a bag of oranges for my fruit-loving girls. Just this Sunday we had a Praise Night at church followed by a chili dinner, and all of the leftover chili was sent home with us. We ate it for 3 days, and I still had a gallon of it left to stick in the freezer today. And in the last 2 weeks we've sold 4 things we had listed on Craigslist, one of which we'd listed several times in the last couple of years with no interest. 

I had just come to the conclusion that while last year God was teaching us all about how He could move in BIG ways, this year's lesson was all about trusting Him on the thin edge of no other options, and we wouldn't be getting any "big" blessings. Then I filed our income tax tonight. Income tax time has always been the time when we caught up on anything we were running behind on, as well as took care of things like new glasses, dental work, replacing worn out shoes, etc. And if we had anything left, we could buy something big, like my camera, or our living room furniture.

This year though we were honestly just hoping that we would get back enough to pay my parents back what we owe them, and we were kind of afraid we might actually have pay something. See, we've always set our paychecks up so that we didn't claim any dependents all year so that we got more back at tax time. One year I messed up and claimed 3 people (me, Nick, and Morgan), and we ended up having to pay about $100 that year when we filed. So since then we've always tried to not take the deductions throughout the year.

When Jack was born on January 2 we joked that if he could have just shown up a couple of days sooner we could have gotten a nicer tax return, although truthfully we were glad for him to have the extra couple of days inside. But we were almost giddy thinking of what an awesome tax return we would have with 3 kids this year. Much to our dismay though, we quickly found that we could no longer pay our bills on the amount Nick was bringing home after taxes, so with a sense of mourning for our much anticipated tax return, he reluctantly adjusted his withholding to reflect all of our dependents. 

Tonight Nick brought home the last document we needed to file, and I took a deep breath and decided to get it over with. Much to our amazement and relief, we'll be getting back almost as much as we got last year! I just want to thank God for the little blessings AND the BIG ones!