day 45: keep the faith

That phrase has me smiling this morning. Josh has been in contact with his future employer to ask about the delay in the paperwork and the reply was that it’s in progress and “keep the faith.” That’s all I needed to hear. I was starting to mildly second guess that maybe they were having a problem adding a person to the department or that there was some other bigger blockade, but I’m happy to wait knowing that it’s being worked out behind the scenes.

We are stuck in another limbo until we know those numbers because they will determine our housing and we can’t look for a place until we know how it’s going to be broken down. It could be that they will pay $65,000 for rent per year and it’s a use it or lose it allowance. All rentals are done annually, paid up front, and that cost is not an exaggeration. Remember, I said in a previous post that housing costs were obscene?  Or it could be a $55,000 housing allowance and if we can find something that costs less we can apply the excess to utilities, school, taxes, etc. Anything less than 55k is going to tough to find, but my goal is to find a house as close as possible to school, with a wall that keeps the dog from jumping out of the yard, that is under whatever we’re allowed. Either way, can you imagine throwing away over 50k per year in rent? Nope, me neither. But that’s what we’ve been doing every year that we live overseas, the difference is that it doesn’t ever show up in our bank account so it technically hasn’t been our money to throw away.

I’d love to find a place before we go home for the summer so I can actually collect some things that we’ll need to furnish our next house. We’ll need a washer/dryer, fridge, stove, beds, couch — basically everything that goes in a house because we’ve had all that provided until now. And as everyone is leaving in June/July, those things are being sold right and left. But I can’t snag any bargains until we have a place to land . . .