Here come more money troubles.

If you follow me on any of my social accounts (check out the links at the bottoms of each main project page for Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, etc.) you know that my husband and I bought a house at the end of last summer, which was unexpected. We knew we needed to move because of our lease in Tennessee ending (and the renewal rate was so much higher!), so we came back to Florida where most of our friends are. Apartment costs even over an hour out from where our central hub would be were astronomical, so we ended up buying.

This took out a bunch of our savings, like 90% of it. The house is small, but it has what we need, and it was at an okay price. We were really lucky. Thing is, the seller of the house hadn’t lived in it for probably decades, clearly renting it out based on how few updates were present and the random “landlord special” paint jobs there were. It was built in the 70s, and the only things in the place that have ever been replaced were probably the roof and the AC. (And we were able to not only call the seller’s bluff when their realtor said they had another buyer who wanted to pay more than we did, but got a chunk knocked off the price when we discovered that the roof had no record showing when it was last replaced.)

So, just from the offset, we knew that we needed to replace the roof within the first year, and that eventually we’d look into replacing the windows, AC, and renovate the kitchen and guest bath. Since the roof was estimated to cost us about $10k, and there’s a deadline, it takes priority over everything else. Unfortunately, our AC started to die about a month ago, even though we were advised that it still had a few years left. Replacing that was $9k. Oh, and before we did that, we had some exterminators come in and help with the rodents in our attic, which (thankfully) my mother-in-law paid for as a housewarming gift.

Here’s where we really get screwed: the company my husband works for just informed him that they’re laying him off. He’s the one making the bulk of our money, so if he doesn’t get a new job fast, we’re in the deepest of shit.

In order to keep our homeowner’s insurance, we HAVE to replace the roof, but with what money? Our savings are depleting quickly, I don’t make enough money at my job to keep us afloat, and my books and merch are doing nothing to help. (Seriously, I’ve had exactly 1 sale of merch for $2.00, and my books average me a profit of $2.49 a month.) And I can’t write fast enough to get new books out there to help keep my titles on anyone’s radar.

It’s getting really hard to do anything fun these days when things like this happen. (And the fun things include my writing and creating merch.) We’re going to have to cut down on just about everything, and I’ll most likely have to start working massive amounts of overtime just to scrape by for the next couple months. So, if anyone reads these updates, I might be gone for a while. We’ll see how things turn out.

-K