I apparently jumped the gun with my announcement of moving to Washington, DC in the previous post. I had my suspicions early on that this new gig was too good to be true and I guess I was proven right. It just took a few days to figure that out. Hello, Massachusetts, I’ll be calling you home for god knows how long again.

Ryan was offered a job that he’d interviewed for about a month ago. The “good” news came last Thursday and the pay he was being offered seemed like it was going to be the answer to a lot of our current problems. Over $20,000 more than he was presently making at the airline looked like an awesome deal. Not to mention the fact that he’d be home every night, would be able to work pretty much whenever he wanted and would give us an opportunity to finally get back on our feet. Everything seemed perfect. Until we started doing some research. Out of curiosity, Ryan e-mailed the guy back for some information on the company’s health insurance plan. A family plan with only health and dental (no vision, mind you) was going to cost nearly $1,000 per month. And that was after the company put in $350! We currently pay about $300 with the airline. Knowing that we have some pretty good insurance, we figured we’d have to spend maybe twice that per month at the new company. Once we heard it was going to cost $1,000, things weren’t looking so perfect anymore. That meant that nearly $12,000 of his salary would be going toward health insurance alone and we would have to pay ADDITIONAL money out of pocket for vision coverage. The $20,000 salary increase wasn’t looking so good anymore and with having to put aside the same amount (as health insurance) per year toward rent, we started to reconsider how great this opportunity was really going to be for us.

Now that things weren’t looking as bright as before, he did some research into what a typical paycheck might look like after taxes and health insurance. We didn’t know it before, but the extra $20,000 he would be making would put us into the next higher tax bracket which was going to eat up a HUGE portion of his paycheck. After some number crunching and figuring out that we’d end up about $500 in the hole if he were to take this job (and that’s with a tiiiiiiight budget), we had to face the harsh reality that this just wasn’t going to work. Even if we were to buy private insurance, we were barely going to break even. Breaking even with a baby and an unreliable car while living away from both of our families simply isn’t going to cut it.

How many times does getting over a 50% increase in pay actually put you worse off then you were before? This makes absolutely no sense to me.

He e-mailed the guy again explaining the situation and telling him that he may have to turn down the opportunity if they can’t come back with a better offer. They weren’t willing to offer relocation assistance so I highly doubt they’ll be willing to offer up more money so that he can take the job. We figured out that we’d need $10,000 more in order to pull it off with our lean budget. Spread over a year, it’s not that large an amount for the company to give him, but with how the economy is right now, I’m sure they could find a million other people to do the job for $10,000 less than they initially offered Ryan (gotta help out those who also receive paychecks from daddy!). Needless to say, things aren’t looking up anymore and we’ve both been having a difficult time facing reality. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I still have hope that this will work out and that they guy will get back to him with an awesome offer, but thinking rationally about the situation, I’m pretty confident that that simply won’t be the case. It’s a hard pill to swallow. We were so hyped up when we heard the news. Believe me when I say that this was THE BEST possible news we could have heard at the time and it was the news that we’d been waiting for for over a year. It’s hard going from that high, thinking that things were finally going to turn around, back down to the lowest of lows. I thought this was going to be our break, our chance to get on our feet again, our chance to finally start our lives as a family, but it looks as though we’ll have to wait awhile longer before that will happen.

Throughout the whole waiting process, I kept reassuring myself that “good things come to those who wait” and after waiting a month past the interview, I thought this was going to be the good thing that was coming to end our patient waiting. Everyone keeps saying that things happen for a reason and all I can do is try to figure out what the reason is behind this not working out for us. I kind of feel like we’re being punished for something because it seems as though every time we get back up, we’re being knocked back down even harder than before. It really does feel like a slap in the face. A slap that’s still stinging over four days later.

I just can’t see another opportunity like this coming along anytime soon. It took a year of frenzied applying to jobs for this hit so I have to wonder how much longer it’s going to take for another one to come along.

And people wonder why I’m always so negative. Or maybe I’m just too positive. I always think there’s some way that something can work out so when it doesn’t work and I realise it can’t or won’t work, I’m completely crushed and begin to lose hope. It’s really becoming difficult to look forward to anything when it always seems as though nothing will work out.

It makes me SO ANGRY that this is THE THIRD time he’s hard to turn down a job because of health insurance (although this one was a combination of health insurance and taxes). And these moronic conservatives don’t think this system needs to be overhauled? I like how conservatives want people to better themselves in terms of their careers and making money and opportunity for yourself by bringing yourself up form nothing, but you can’t even do that because health insurance is either too expensive or not even available. And even though that last issue has been partly addressed with the new healthcare law, it was the reason Ryan had to turn down two previous jobs. Just as the lack or unavailability of healthcare was looked at, the cost of healthcare needs some serious looking at. IF ONLY we lived in a place like Canada or England… I wouldn’t mind paying higher taxes then because you actually get something for your money in these places. No, we have to keep throwing our tax dollars away on bullets for unwinnable wars and fixing everyone else’s problems. Living the American Dream my ass. Forget DC. The longer I live in the US, the more I want out of this increasingly backwards place. Oh, and while we’re at it, lets stop vaccinating our children and then teaching them that slavery never existed. That is, if they live long enough to go to school and haven’t already died from a disease that’s reappearing after having been virtually wiped out for decades. Yep, gotta love this country. Freedom and opportunity at its best.