Quite frankly, 2024 has been a series of disasters for our family. We are both gainfully employed without employment gaps, with two wonderfully kids and we are usually on the other side of things like this. To begin, we spent the second half of 2023 making two house payments and sets of utilities while waiting for our home to sell after moving. Out of desperation to sell, we took a lower offer than ever imagined. We moved on having used most of our savings to make the transition work.
Unfortunately, we started 2024 with a fire in the new (to us) home a few days after Christmas. This displaced us for over 4 months as we fought with insurance adjusters (4 in total) and two restoration companies, one of which disposed of over $60,000 worth of our belongings and the other which used their owned discretion in how they handled our belongings which ran up their fees unnecessarily. This resulted in their fees being paid first and left us financially devastated with the choice of our b...