The day I suffered my spinal cord injury...
I was working at a fast food restaurant one evening when a man came in at 11:15 and ordered some food. After I took his money and opened the register to give him his change, he pulled out a small caliber gun and demanded all of the money. There was a little over $50 in the drawer which I started to hand over to him. During the exchange, somehow the money dropped on the counter. That was when everything seemed to go in slow motion. We both looked in each others eyes, and then he shot me in the neck. My life would never be same after that moment. The bullet damaged my spinal cord around the 7th vertebrae of my neck, leaving me paralyzed from the chest down. My co-workers called 911 and an ambulance came within a few minutes. I spent 7 days in a regular hospital and 100 days in a rehab hospital.

They caught the guy a week after the incident and he is now halfway through serving his 22 year sentence for assault with a deadly weapon and armed robbery.

So there's a little more background about me. Now to finances.

Here's a current snapshot of my finances (net worth view) after my pending divorce:

Net worth calculation
house 2 value 175,000k (-134K mortgage) = 41,000
house 3 value 234,000k (-165K mortgage) = 69,000
Pending House 4 value 384,000k (-384k mortgage) = 0

IRA 6,000
401K 3,000
Stock Account 3,000
4 x Bank accounts 7,000 Fluctuates a lot due to expenses
RampVan 25,000

4x Credit Cards -33,000

Net worth approximation $120,000
So this one view of my finances. Another very important view to one's finances is cash flows. I'll go over that in a future post. It's one thing to have a lot of debt and assets. It's another to be able to pay those debts. Cash flow is king, they say, at least in the business world. Whether you agree your household should be run like a business is a whole other issue.

On a side note, a reader had wondered why I "needed" to buy a new house given my current situation. There were many considerations in what the housing situation would be after the divorce.

I knew of the bat, that the kids wouldn't be primarily staying with me. My 2nd daughter was born in our current house. Many memories with the kids were made at this house even in 3 short years. So, we wanted to minimize the disruption for the kids. So it was decided that my wife would keep the house, with the kids primarily living with her. That was despite the fact that $25,000 worth of handicap accessible modifications were done to the house including a modified kitchen, bathroom, doors, and ramps.

So out of the house I was going. Options: rent apartment, rent house, buy house. Having an accessible home is a necessity. The availability of accessible housing is fairly limited in my area. Not that there is a low supply of accessible housing in my area, it's the fact that there is a really high demand for it in my town. All of the accessible apartments in the area had long waiting lists.

So it was down to buying or renting a house. Another consideration was whether or not I was going to live with myself or not. I preferred having someone live with me to help me with things I couldn't do. My brother was the first person I talked to and he was up for it. He lived 30 minutes away from and works only a few blocks from where he worked. So he wanted to make it worth his while to move to where I was. Finding an accessible house would end up being a difficult task also. There weren't any for sale, or for rent right off the bat. There were some good prospective houses for sale that could be modified, but then I found a housing development that was in the mid/early stages. Figuring it would cost $25,000 or so to make the necessary modifications to an old home, I decided to see what the new housing development would charge me to build it the way I wanted. Surprisingly, they told me they would do the modifications at NO charge. After taking into account the free modifications, the price of a brand new home would be about the same or less than buying an unmodified home. So that's basically how I came to the decision to buy a brand new home. Just signed the closing docs today. Actual closing won't be for a least a week though. House is still under construction.