Lesson Learned

With all the changes we went through in 2011, now in 2012 we are starting to see some of the things we did wrong.

#1.  When you move to a new state, you should immediately register your car.  This is something we knew needed to be done, but we did not consider it a priority.  Apparently, you have 90 days to do so, and then you start getting charged a late fee.  No one told us this.  When we tried to explain to the DMV we had no knowledge of the late fee, they simply said that we are now citizens of Colorado and it is our own duty to know of the laws of the state in which we live.  So, now it is costing us about $500 to register both our cars.  And the icing on top of the dumb DMV cake is that it takes a lot of paperwork to register your car.  LOTS.

#2.  When you move, just move to a home and stay there.  Jumping around from apartment to apartment was financially best for us, but sucked big time.  It cause a lot of unforeseen problems, like mistake #3.

#3.  Change your address immediately.  Those 6 weeks in July/August while Chad was training all over the country, I was living in Gunnison with my parents.  With all the moving and new job and new insurance and all that crap we were filling out, we put my parent's address as our home address.  We changed bank accounts and everything to my parent's home.  When we got to Colorado, we got a P.O. Box and set that as our home address for everything.  It was a hassle, but that is not the unforeseen problem.  The problem is that since Chad was technically working for Microsoft in Denver, we were being taxed in Colorado.  But because our address was in Utah, we were also being taxed in Utah.  The result: we are losing about $300 in our tax return.  All because of those stupid 6 weeks in limbo.

#4.  Ward hopping seems ok when you are in limbo.  But it causes unforeseen problems as well.  We were paying tithing to random wards we were living in for about 4 months.  It is now almost impossible (ok, maybe I should use the word annoying instead of impossible) to get the information we need to get the refund on our tax return.  We don't know the bishop's name, the ward name, or anything.  We were just going to church and paying our tithing to the church without a second thought of the consequence.

I cannot believe we have been in Colorado for 6 months.  I feel like we are just finally getting into a routine and things are starting to feel normal.  I like feeling normal.  I think it is safe to say that we are DONE moving for a long while.