Friday, September 24, 2010

Quick update

Just a quick update to say that my daughter's surgery went well and we were able to come home on Wednesday. It was a very long day - she went into the OR at about 12noon and didn't get out of recovery and up to her hospital room until 9pm. But she's doing great and that's the main thing!

I am super excited about my Amazon selling adventure! I went to one book sale and picked up a few books, but my goal now is to qualify for selling in the Toys & Games section for Christmas, then use the proceeds from that to get my PDA scanner and go full swing into selling books.

That's about it - will update again as I get more into the holiday toy selling season!

Friday, September 10, 2010

Heading in a new direction

Well, it's been quite a long time since I've posted to the blog, but I figure I would trying and catch things up and let everyone know what's been going on.

My daughter was unexpectedly hospitalized at the end of July, and that really kind of threw us completely off kilter. I was staying with her, and we were there for about 7 days. She is going to have surgery again on September 20th, but we only hope to be in the hospital for 2 days this time, so that's good.

I've been rethinking my goals for real estate investing, and have come to the conclusion that I am not going to pursue real estate investing until we are on Baby Step 3 (we are big Dave Ramsey fans). This was a tough decision, but I feel that it is the right one for us as a family, especially because of the medical bills that have cropped up due to my daughter's hospitalization. Although we have pretty decent health insurance through my husband's employer, we still have a maximum out of pocket per individual of $3500 per year, and we did not have that much in our flexible spending account to cover the difference.

So, having put real estate investing on hold for now, I then had to figure out how to boost our income on a regular basis. Applying for jobs has not panned out, and now my time is going to be even more limited, as I will be helping my husband's grandfather with taking him to the doctor, dentist, grocery shopping, etc, which I am also currently doing for my mother. So I've decided that I'm going to work on selling books on Amazon using their Fulfillment by Amazon program. The start-up cost is low, and the opportunity to make a consistent monthly income is very good. I hope to get a start on getting ramped up for business before my daughter and I head to the hospital on the 20th.

So that's it for now. I will still update the blog so you can see how I'm doing with my Amazon business. :)

Oh, I almost forgot. Funny story - I received a phone call from someone to whom I sent a probate letter back in January. He said that he's getting ready to put the house in question on the market, but wanted to give me a chance to put in an offer before he does it. I've got to call him back this weekend - should be interesting!