14 Months Later

A lot has happened in the past year, and while I gather my thoughts about what specifically I want to share with "the world" I wanted to put up an "I'm Back!" message.

Things have been insane, with lots of twists and turns.

General Updates:
- I'm not 100% kicked of impulse spending. I still make the occasional impulse buy, but I have gotten better.
- I have taken on no more consumer credit. My cards stayed shredded, with all (but 1) accounts closed! No new credit card charges in 16+ months!
- I am trying to sell my house. I took on far more than I could comfortably handle. More on that later.

I hope to use this blog as my weekly/monthly/quarterly/yearly review, to publicly display and evaluate my personal progress on the financial journey I began when I received my first allowance.

Frustration

Arghh! I lost my $142.50 TransPass somewhere between the train and work this morning. Sorry to use harsh letters, but WTF?!

I can only hope that with my receipt (which I kept since it's a write-off for a contractor) I can get a replacement, or at least one at a discount. If I can't... I'll just kick myself all month long.

An important lesson in public transit riding here. It's worth the 2 bucks for a lanyard and pass holder!! What's worse is that I know I have a lanyard and holder at home somewhere from my previous job.

The level of personal frustration I feel about this is very high, almost to the point of being disproportionate to the problem. While "technically" I have enough money for another pass, what a waste of $142.50! Especially at a time in my life when every penny matters to me. There was a time when I would have shrugged it off and ate the loss, but in my present financial condition this is a major setback.

Hope everyone else's day is going better than mine...

Day One Success

The day is nearly done, and the only money I spent was on a necessary monthly transit pass.

I'm not going out again, so there is relatively little chance of spending any money! As you may notice from the title, I am embarking on a Steve Pavlina-inspired set of 30 day trials. While I won't be detailing much about them here, I'm keeping my personal log and giving some low-hanging (but still challenging) trials a shot.

Another financial success today - I lowered my car insurance by 6.2%! I now have a $1000 backstop (and have for over a month) so I increased my deductible to save some cash. And since I'm not driving every day, I have less chance of being in an accident. I'm looking forward to the day that I'll make my insurance policy payment in one lump sum every 6 months, but I'm not yet there. (This will save about $48 / year.) Another option, depending on what happens in the next two months, is getting rid of the car all together. That would save around $500 / month but severely limit my options for part-time work. And it may be quite expensive for me to get out of my lease. Yes, I leased. And it was probably the best option for me at the time. And I'm glad I got the "new car" thing out of the way. It was nice to do once, but probably not again. Even if I have the means, "new" matters less than "awesomeness".

Working in a downtown metropolitan area makes it VERY difficult to not go out to eat for lunch. There are so many options, and so many interesting people... but you pay dearly for all of that. Today I stayed in - I hope I can continue this good start.

A Spender's Story

I have credit card debt. Lots of it. Why? Because I suck at life. Just kidding, but being in debt as far as I am makes me feel that way sometimes. I got into credit cards knowing they were evil, knowing I was just digging a whole, and knowing I was make life for my future self harder. And I didn't care. Strike that, I always felt guilt putting "stuff" on credit - it just didn't seem to matter that much.

Fast forward nine years, a layoff, a house payment, and a huge pay cut later...

I know that this is my (huge) mistake, and I intend to fix it, but a very large lifestyle change is on the horizon in order to do that. I've been slowly meandering in that direction, but always with self-imposed setbacks. Now is the time to buckle down, knuckle up, and get rid of the debt once and for all.

I'm not sure how I'm going to reduce my monthly expenses enough to afford my house on my new salary (if there even is a "new salary", I'm contracting at the moment).

I have already dumped cable+HBO, all subscriptions and monthly-pay games (*cough*eve-online*cough*). I've gone from eating out almost every day to once per week. That one's going to go now too. I've just gotten out of my Cingular/AT&T contract, and while I'd like to scale back my service - I'm also not eager to sign another 2 year deal. I'd rather be a free agent. I'm going to shop around and see what I can do in person. I've found I definitely do not need the feature-rich package I currently have.

I'm a little nervous, since I've shredded the credit cards, about how all of this will work out. I know that at the moment I don't make enough to pay all of my bills, let alone eat, drive, etc. I'm pretty sure I'll survive, but I can already see that this is going to be very hard to do without going further into debt. A part-time after-work job may be in order. I want to see after a month or so how things are going.

So, this is how it feels at the bottom.

Today's Activity: Shredding the Credit Cards

Now there's no going back. I've shredded the credit cards - and good riddance. Now it's just a matter of paying them off. A long road lies ahead, but I think I'm strong enough to do it.