When it works, it works.

I’ve written a bit about finances here before. My biggest hurdle to leaving my job has been the financial consequences. I haven’t quite admitted until now that I’ve been waiting for the proverbial hammer to fall. I’ve been waiting for some financial catastrophe to befall us that would make leaving my job imprudent if not completely impossible. We’ve known since January that we owe taxes this year, approximately $1200 worth. It was worked into the budget so we’ve been prepared. My husband has also been commenting for a few months that he needs to get his brakes replaced on his car. Well, Uncle Sam came first of course. We procrastinated until Sunday night to finish our taxes. I’d done a quick job of it months earlier to figure out what we owed but we waited to finalize everything and pay until Sunday. We were just about done with our taxes. We use TurboTax. It was just about to run our error check when I mentioned that I hadn’t yet entered our charitable contributions to our church. We’ve never been eligible to itemize so I didn’t even bother. We decided to go back anyway and add it in. To my great surprise, it bumped us over the standard deduction. We knocked $500 off of our tax bill in just a few minutes. We were thrilled to cut our tax bill, and my husband decided to take his car in to get the brakes done today since he is off for Spring Break. He called me later to tell me the estimate and he had spoken with the mechanic. It turns out we had the brakes done less than two years ago. It’s a good thing we have a trustworthy mechanic. What should have been a $500-700 bill for the brakes is now less than two hundred for an oil change and other minor repairs.

It illustrates a couple of things for me that I’ve observed in my own life and in the lives of others but have yet to really put my faith in yet, when you are on the right path and step out in faith, your needs will be provided for. Yes, we do still owe taxes and our car did need a part to fix a leak in the brake fluid but we also saved what could have been up to a $1,000 in expenses over the past two days. There have been numerous times in my life when things have just worked out like when I got the promotion at work while pregnant with my second daughter. It allowed me to go to ¾ time at work while still making around the same money so I could spend more time with my girls.

It has worked out for us for me to stay home. I’m not yet sure where that $200-300 a month is going to come from but for the first time in my life I’m not sweating it because I know that our needs will be provided for.