The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Today, while the market was tanking and nothing but more bad news hit the airwaves, I searched travel sites online until my eyes rolled up into my head. Come hell or high water, we are going on vacation; modest, of course, but vacation nonetheless. It seems that my school district has a Thursday and Friday off during the first weeks of February before the February President's week vacation. Why do school districts still have this much vacation time off when most parents have to go to work? It seems it is a ploy just to drag out those 180 actual school days so it appears that the children are in school for more time than they really are.

After speaking to some other mothers, it turns out that I am not the only one eyeing those 2 days as a convenient 4 day 3 night time period to have a shorter and therefore much cheaper vacation and also avoid the crowds and hassle of going away during the over-hyped, over-inflated February break with the entire school-aged American population to boot. As usual, "just about everybody is going to Florida," this I hear from my children every year around this time, "why can't we go on vacation?" Poor children, they were not put here to understand the greater cause of sacrifice at such a young age.

We always had hope that we would go away some time but every time we found an airfare and multiplied it by 4, we changed our mind; saving for the greater good or paying down more on a debt was always a better use of those funds. However, despite the perilous financial condition of the country and ourselves, we are going to go, finally. We are simply fed up with our austerity budget and still stinging from the fact that while everyone was living large over the last few years, we never got to take that ride. And now, when we hoped to see an improvement in our particular condition, we are now seriously challenged by the financial viability of the corporations we work for.

We were so glad to return to the corporate world and get off the small business merry-go-round of long hard hours for little pay, if any, we swore we would never complain about our jobs again and we didn't. Now my job is gone and my husband's hangs on a thread; his company riddled by so much debt, large though they may be, that they still have not made a profit this entire decade. Ridiculous.

Of course, we emphasize deeply with our fellow small-business owners and we treat them with the utmost respect because we truly know how it is. You have to struggle for 2 years on your own before most lending institutions and creditors will even loan you any money and then they all, including the SBA, still tie all of that debt to your personal name when they do finally say yes. That was the surprising thing about the SBA, in particular, it is set up to loan money to small business, guaranteed by the government, but the loan is still tied to the individual borrower and not the business entity. There is no easy way of getting out of this debt, the government will repay the bank if you default but then the government will come after you to recover those funds by any means necessary - complete federal rights to garnish your paycheck, hijack your tax refund or simply sue you. So much for a government guarantee.

The media keeps reporting that small businesses are the engine of the economy but so far I haven't heard of any plans to help relieve small business owners, most of whom have extended themselves on home equity loans and credit cards to survive. We did it and it is not very pretty. Nevertheless, we acted responsibly, we were resolute and vowed not to let our new extreme debt condition bring us down; we acknowledged that it would take years to pay off the business debt and that would have a futher consequence of setting our financial lives back so far that we are still hesitant to sum up the damage.

However, witnessing all of this bailing out of the profligate - homeowners who had overextended themselves in dwellings that they couldn't afford and businesses who simply had no common sense to save for a rainy day - it is difficult for us to champion the bailouts when we strived so hard to be responsible and it seems our counterparts did not. And so we will go on vacation, short but sweet, somewhere close and not too expensive, before my severance runs out and before our patience runs out. People who work hard are supposed to take a break and yet so far we have not.

We realize it will never be a good time to go away but we should take the opportunity now while we are both still receiving a paycheck. Now if I can just get past the prices which are still, in my opinion, way too high...