Business and Working and Schooling OH MY!

Before we even had kids, my wife and I decided that if that time ever came, we would want her to be a stay at home mom. Our mom's were there for our formative years and we wanted the same for our kids.

She was working for a medical management company. Her job was to ensure the Doctor's offices they managed were properly credentialed with insurance companies. This gave her quite a bit of experience working with medical insurance and also provided some experience in medical billing.

One of the doctors asked my wife to do some of his private billing and ultimately went out on his own. When we found out we were pregnant with Josh, we thought this was something she could do part time from home. She left the medical management company for maternity leave with the intent on not going back to work. However, she still had this part time gig, so it was pretty convenient.

Our cape cod in the Philadelphia NJ suburb of Maple Shade, had a somewhat finished upper level and I used my limited skills to do some drywall work and painting to make one side an office space.

My brother-in-law worked for a computer shop at the time and built us our first computer. It was state of the art. . .for the mid 90's! This thing "boasted" a 500mb hard drive, and 56k RAM. In today's computer terms this wouldn't even be a dummy terminal! Our cell phones have way more power than this! Anyway, it was more than capable to do what we needed it to do, and with our free AOL and CompuServe months (remember getting those discs in the mail?), we also got internet access via our phone line.

The doctor also had some associates that went to various facilities, and needed someone to bill for those too. Once Josh was born this worked out pretty well. She would feed him in the morning and then bring him up to the office with her. He would sit in his swing and take a nap while she worked. After he was mobile, we put a corral up there with his toys and blankets and he would play and sleep.

Fast forward a few years after Seth was born and we moved to our current location in another Philadelphia Suburb of NJ. With some references for my wife's billing acumen, we had some additional doctors to bill for and we became "Helping Hands Billing Solutions, LLC". At one point, we helped three other stay at home moms start their own LLC's and become contractors for us. We were now billing for eleven doctors. My wife hired a high school girl to help with some office work and also help with the kids.

My wife's Aunt would also help us out by coming over a couple of days a week to watch the boys, and my parents would do the same.

It was perfect! She could run her own business and be home with the kids. The hours could be flexible and she could contribute to our income. I helped with the technology end so all of the billers could work remotely and everything went into our database. It worked out well for a few years.

Then the whole thing happened at school when Josh was in Kindergarten. Trying to get the district and other necessary players working on the issue, took up a lot of my wife's time (see the post called "The Battle With The District"). The other stay at home mom billers didn't really get that they were independent contractors. They weren't really running their businesses and depended on my wife far more than they should have. Essentially she was managing them as employees which was not really the idea. On top of all of that, after the whole mishandling of the school issue by the district, we decided to homeschool.

It took a while, but the stress of trying to run and support a business (even with help), me working full time, and then homeschooling, her during the day, me at night, became a lot to handle. To add to that, I had a commute that made me the front runner as poster child for road rage. It took me at least a half hour to wind down when I got home, everyone knew not to talk to me until I did. It was not a good way to live.

We decided to close the business and focus on the kids. Of course that didn't make my road rage any better, but it did take some stress off of my wife.

I will tell you it certainly wasn't unicorns and rainbows. We had some tough times ahead of us financially, psychologically, and personally. This was by no means the way we planned our life when we got married and decided to have kids. But this was our life and we had to deal with whatever each day threw at us.