I suppose I should go and introduce myself now. I am a 29 yo divorced female living near downtown Seattle with my SO of 3.5 years. I have been doing nails for over four years and I work in an upscale nail salon downtown. My job is pretty much everything I ever wanted and I wouldn't want to work in any other industry. My SO is a professional temp. :P
I have an 8yo daughter with my ex husband who is with him during the school year and with me on breaks. She goes to a really good magnet school in Alaska, and the schools here are questionable at best (some of them are downright awful) so it's better for now if she goes to school there and lives with her dad and stepmom.
Right now I am working on paying off a lot of medical debt. I have had several medical problems since I was 19 years old, and for part of that time I had no insurance, plus I was unable to work for several years, so there has been a lot of debt. I am down to about 3500$ left, with an all time high of over 12K. I always paid off as much as I could while I was well and working, but never all of it. I've never had the opportunity to get into consumer debt due to what the medical bills have done to my credit. I often had to borrow money from my family just to buy my medications. It has been rough. Right now things are stable with my health so hopefully it will stay that way.
I haven't had a car in over 6 years, have never had a cell phone, don't have a tv or cable, and am not really interested in consumer electronics. Every computer I have ever had has been really old with no resale value and given to me by someone else, except for the one I bought my first year in college. I am willing to pay for a fast internet connection, but not much else. I'm not a shopper either, there is no room to store the stuff I already have here anyway, so it's pretty easy for me to be frugal.
We go out to restaurants a lot since it's the one thing we really enjoy, and that is completely worth it to me. Since I get a smallish amount of my pay in cash tips (credit card and tips on checks go in my paycheck) which are irregular and nothing I can count on, I use that for eating out, chair massages, anything I want to buy that I don't really need. I also use it for activities when my daughter is here.
We have an aquarium and my fish are the second most important thing to me next to my daughter. Not really, but close. We have 2 blood parrot cichlids and a big pleco. My SO and I are both huge fish lovers and would like to get several more larger aquariums when we have the space. They are expensive, but you can save a ton by buying them from craigslist. Cichlids are very entertaining fish and they have the funniest personalities. You would think fish would be popular in the city, but everyone has dogs here. We have to walk a couple miles to buy fish food and supplies in Chinatown. I also wouldn't mind getting a miniature poodle someday. I am not so enamored with the work involved in having a dog in the city though, so I may not. I sure like them.
Anyway, if you have made it through all of that, it is nice to meet you all.
