So, in Blog #26 I talked about friendships to be thankful for. In this blog I want to talk about  Do your own Research Ahead of time.

And no, this blog isn’t about my first marriage, well maybe a little bit. Diane and I were getting married in June 1985 and it was May. Jim calls me to tell me Cincinnati Shoe company was going to close all the Lease departments in Fresno and that he had a job lined up for me in the Bay area.

Since the cost of living was more, I’d get a small raise to compensate for it. It was about $4k more a year. Knowing I was getting married soon and we had to close the departments , the transfer would be in mid July. So before the wedding I decided to borrow some money from my 401k (big mistake which i’ll explain later) for the honeymoon.

The wedding

Pretty soon it’s the big day and my brother David is my best man and Louis and Diane’s brother were groomsmen. I had wanted Bryon as a groomsman too but that got nixed by the “wedding police”. To this day I feel bad about that, as he’s always been one of my closest friends. He had moved out of town to the bay area beforehand so we hadn’t talked in a while, so things got away from us I guess.

The wedding went as planned and everyone had a great time. So off to Hawaii and during the course of the trip, I kept telling Diane to just enjoy the trip and don’t worry about the money. We had a great time.

July rolls around and Diane couldn’t leave Fresno for a few months to wrap some things up, so I moved to the Bay Area to get an apartment. I went to the new store (Joyce-Selby)and met Homer my new boss. He seemed like a good guy and he gave me some tips about the Bay Area and where to look. I found an apartment not too long after that, but had to wait a few months for it to be open and also for Diane to arrive. “What was I going to do?” I thought.

Bryon

The next day in the store, I met the team and out of the corner of my eye I see this guy that looked like Bryon, walking in the mall. I called out BRYON! And he didn’t hear me, so I yelled out rather loud “HEY YOU HOSER”, which was our saying to each other from our roommate days.

He turns around and we are both amazed this moment was happening. What were the chances. I tell him my predicament and he says ”come live with me for a few months then” so I moved to Pacifica which was a commute but it was like old times. We had such a great time together in those next 60 days.

Diane arrives

Diane finally gets to the bay area and we move into the apartment which was twice the rent of Fresno. We had to pay double the rent for the deposit and the rent was $600 a month at the time. I was only making a meager 22k a year so things would be tight until Diane got a job. I should have figured out our living expenses beforehand and all the cost involved.

After we moved in, Diane informs me she made a clerical mistake on our account, so we had zero money in our bank account now…things were going to be real tight…

Do your own research ahead of time

And make sure you know all the details when being transferred to another area. The cost of living was high in the Bay area which was fine, because we thought we could dig into the savings that we had, oops…at least we had a great time in Hawaii lol.