After living in our new house in Pennsylvania for a year, we corrected our mistake of not selling our old house first, by finally off-loading it for far less than we'd planned. That was obviously not great but things got worse in March when, with a wife and two very young children to support, I was laid off from work. A lot of other people around the world suffered the same fate that year. We were more fortunate than others. Welcome to the real world. Welcome to 2009.