Steve's New Job

It's Steve's birthday today. Happy Birthday Steve!!! I'd love to do something special today but after dishing out $971.36 yesterday so they would turn my phone back on, I think we'll just have the buy one get one free at Qdoba's  :-)


So in honor of Steve, I'll write about him first today. He recently accepted a position with Dakota Abstract here in Brookings and is no longer with the bank. Right now he's enjoying his new office and doing lots of training but eventually he'll be a closer. That means that whenever someone is buying property, he goes in to the closing and reviews the contract, explains the closing costs of loans, titles and appraisals and clarifies fees added to property sales. The short version is that when you buy a house or property, he's the other guy in the room at closing besides the banker and real estate agent.


I always told him that I don't care what he does as long as he doesn't come home crabby every day and the bills get paid. He's been there three weeks and so far, he's loving it!!! It's a lot to learn but he has a banking background and a bit of an insurance background, plus he loves working with people.


The insurance mess that I was dealing with a few weeks ago came about because of Steve's new job. We met with his new company and their insurance liaison prior to his job switch, just to make sure that the insurance would work for our families needs. Everything looked good. Fast forward to a week before he started, when I had him verify that we would be covered. Turned out that no one had mentioned that the new insurance wouldn't start for 60 days after the start of employment!!! No worries, they said, just use COBRA for that time period. When we looked into it, COBRA would cost us $3000 just for the two months. Yikes!!! But it's all good now. We have 60 days to determine if we want to utilize COBRA or not and we're already almost halfway through that time period. If something would happen in the next few weeks, we could retro-actively pay for the insurance and still be covered. Until then, we'll just wait it out. And because four of our children were adopted through foster care, they were covered under our insurance first and then secondarily covered by Medicaid. So if they have anything, Medicaid will pick it up for the next month. Whew!!!


Oh, and have I mentioned that the car Steve was borrowing until we could buy him another one was making funny noises on the way to Sioux Falls the other day. He ended up leaving it at my folks and taking my dad's pickup to Sioux Falls. Brittney's car is still in the shop and it looks like it's a head gasket issue. $$$$$$$. I can't wait to see what that might cost :-( 


So life has been a little hectic around here lately and I haven't even mentioned the kid issues that we're dealing with. So if anyone wants to take me out for coffee, feel free! If you don't see me, you can find me buried under my covers until April. Just kidding. It's been sunny so I'll probably go do some hard manual labor outside.


If you see Steve around, be sure to tell him Happy Birthday!!!