Minor Woo December 2, 2008

Lots going on in my world right now.

I feel a lot better about my job situation now, than I did a few weeks ago. I’ve had some good conversations with my current boss, as well as the CEO, and I feel a lot more solid about what my role in the company is, and will be in the future. Things are shifting around, and while I won’t get to go back to the job I was doing for most of 2008 anytime in the near future, I will get to take on some new responsibilities and challenges, and overall, I think some of the new stuff will be both more interesting and a better fit for my skill set.

Another good piece of financial news: I’m very, very close to finishing my Master’s degree, and have simply lacked the time/motivation to do so. Its a priority to my job that I do finish it, so they are willing to work with me to make that happen. The details have yet to be ironed out, but the general idea is that they would let me take some regular, 9-5 time to take a class, if necessary, and would also contribute financially to the remaining credits, either outright or as some sort of a bonus. This is fabulous, because one of the things that has been holding me back is my desire not to accrue any more student loan debt. Now I just need to get moving on it, and contact my (former?) advisor and see what the process is to get enrolled for Spring classes.

I paid off the Target card in full yesterday, largely because I could, and I needed to mental boost of actually paying something off, rather than just making a dent in it. I’m also making pretty good progress on the Bank of America card. Its all a little bittersweet, though, because Christmas is coming, and as much as I am trying to cut back and control costs, and not over-do it, my giving nature is geting the better of me. Yesterday, I spent $260 on the Gap Card, which had previously been paid off, and $80 on the Old Navy card, which was also cleared. I also have a $50 J. Crew rewards card that needs to be used by 12/15, and I know I’m not going to be able to just spend the $50, its going to go slightly over. But, I have the money budgeted to pay off those store cards again by end of the year, and should hopefully be entering 2009 with no balances on store cards! I should also have the Bank of America and Chase cards paid in full a few months into 2009, which will give me a really good feeling of accomplishment.

I feel panic October 14, 2008

Maybe its just a sign of the times, but I can’t help it – I am spending an awful lot of time feeling panicky and sick to my stomach lately. I just can’t stop thinking about everything – how on earth I am going to pay down my debt, and still pay rent, and school loans, and utilities, and eat. And then, I get news like this and it just destroys my world. Now, really, in the grand scheme of life an extra $2 a day isn’t catastrophic – but I already have my budget so tightly allocated, trying to find an additional $40+ a month to pay for parking just makes my head hurt. I’ve long-ago cut out my daily Starbucks run. I’m down to buying lunch maybe once every three weeks. We aren’t going out to bars, or movies, or dinner at all anymore. The only places to cut money are from my debt repayment plans, and, wow, I can not even express how much that sucks.

I found out about this little fare hike yesterday afternoon, and have literally not been able to stop thinking about it since then. I feel like something has to give, financially, but I’m just not sure what. I am at the point where I could literally spend an entire day reimagining what I would do with the money I project I will earn in the next few years – different debt allocation, different priorities, “what if?” scenarios galore.

I just feel very helpless and out of control right now.

Impulse Control October 6, 2008

I have some serious issues with impulse control, and its definitely a large, contributing factor to why I have so much debt.

I just nearly bought $50 worth of Christmas ornaments. In the beginning of October. Seriously, what is wrong with me? I was on a mission this weekend to find and purchase these very particular bowls that my Mom has from Crate + Barrel. Unfortunately, they didn’t seem to have them, or anything like them, anymore. So, I went online this morning to look at the website. Still no luck. While I was there, I remembered that we also discussed needing an entryway mat for the kitchen sometime in the near future – its not a big problem right now, but the carpets in our apartment are all pretty light, and winter is about to descend upon New England. So, I was searching for a floormat when I also noticed a link for the Crate + Barrel Outlet. I, of course, clicked on over, and found a veritable treasure trove of new things that I <b>must</b> have! I had filled my cart up with $50 worth of Christmas ornaments, reasoning that Christmas is coming soon, and we don’t really have any ourselves, but something made me pause, and reconsider.

Did I really want to spend that kind of money on Christmas ornaments? Didn’t it kind of go against my already, formed thoughts on Christmas ornament acquistion – that it should be more personal and meaningful than just buying a bunch of random stuff?

I closed the browser window. One small victory.

Travel Lust October 1, 2008

I absolutely, in no sense of the word, can afford to take an out-of-town vacation right now, but I am dealing with some serious travel lust. I’m subscribed to a lot of different travel deal type newsletters, and every time they come, they have some awesome deal to a place that I’d love to go. Last year, BF and I took a very spontaneous 3 night vacation to an all-inclusive resort in the Mayan Rivieria – and it was amazing. I’d love the chance to do something like that again, but I know that financially, its just not in the cards for us right now. I’ve got some very rigourous payoff goals to meet, BF has his student loan payments beginning in November, as well as a small debt that he needs to finish paying off. Plus all the other, unspoken things that need to be paid for.

Today marks one month since we moved in together, and so far, so good. We’ve definitely cut down on the eating out thing – We’ve only gone out a handful of times this month, and some of those were unavoidable (his Sister’s Rehersal dinner, food in the city before a baseball game, Sushi with friends). It still sounds extravagent compared to a lot of other PF bloggers, but for us, it is definitely progress. There have been periods where we were eating out 5 days a week, or more. We are still working on developeing a reasonable grocery budget, but I think that will come in time – every trip so far has been between $100 and $200, mainly due to adding a bunch of “kitchen staples” items. But, we will get better. In the meantime, I am left wishing I had been smarter all these years and could afford to fly off to someplace tropical and wonderful for a few days.

Decluttering my life September 23, 2008

It was exactly 3 weeks ago yesterday that BF and I moved into our new place, and we are finally, finally, just starting to have everything organized and in place. A mini-emergency with his oil pan during a routine oil change on Saturday left his car out of commission until mid-day yesterday, so we both took the opportunity to take a day off, re-group and get some things done. We hung the DVD racks we had purchased on Sunday, and put up the little shelf in the kitchen that I wanted for my cookbooks, and now, I really feel like things are coming along nicely.

One thing that I had been sort of dreading was dealing with all of my cosmetics. And, I’m not just talking about actual makeup – this includes bath products, soaps, lotions, hair products, etc. etc. During the unpacking process, I put pretty much everything that I came across into a few big plastic bins, which had been sitting in the middle of our bedroom floor ever since. This weekend, though, I dumped them all out and began the big sort.

I knew I had a “product problem” – but I had no idea it was as bad as it really was! I ended up sorting everything, junking anything that looked old or nasty, or that I knew I would never use, and putting the rest of it away. I found that I had at least 6 new, unopened toothbrushes, a few extra tubes of toothpaste, probably 5 different sets of shampoo and conditioner, over 30 different lotions, including at least 5 different lotions specifically designed for feet, numerous bottles of body spray and perfume, and probably 25 different hair products – everything from pomade and hairspray to heat protecting sprays and curl inducing gels. I’ll have to take a picture of it all tonight, because its pretty frightening.

I also have a surprisingly large number of things in sample size – all of which i put into a container and stored in a closet. I also pre-packed my favorite makeup bag with all the things I could possibly need for a trip out of town – smaller versions of shampoo and conditior, contacts case and lense solution, deoderant, body spray, lotion, shower gel – its all there, I just would need to throw in a hairbrush and my day to day makeup, and go.

I’ve actually been doing this for a while, but the sorting and organizing really emphasised it for me – I do not need to buy any more of these sorts of products for a very, very long time. The only thing that I can possibly think of that I will run out of and need to replenish is my daily facial moisturizer – but then I realized that just because I prefer to use Clinique, it doesn’t mean that I should replace it every time it goes empty. When I use up the other things, it will be a reward to myself to buy the brand I prefer.

Goals September 19, 2008

One thing that I’ve come to realize in the last few months is that I am more than a little overwhelemed by my financial situation, and the number of moving parts. I keep constantly reevaluating what I am doing, what I should be doing, what the best way to get this all paid off really is. I’ve decided that I need to stop looking at the big, overall debt picture for a little bit, and try and focus on one thing at a time.

So, what are my overall, high level goals?

1. Pay off all Credit Card Debt
2. Pay off all School Loan Debt
3. Save money for the future/a house – $25,000

Pay off all Credit Card Debt

This is certainly the most concrete of my goals. I just finished paying off my J. Crew card, and am now, finally, store-card free. This leaves me with an interesting dilema – do I attack the smallest debt first, or the one with the worst interest rate? I’ve decided to do sort of a combination of both. My Goals are as follows:

1. Pay off Chase Card – $1238.10 @ 29.99%
2. Pay off Target – apprx $500 @ 18.99%
3. Pay off Bank of America – $1953.56 @ 29.99%
4. Pay off Capital One – $3449.88 @3.99%
5. Pay off American Express – $7033.87 @11.99%
6. Pay off Citi – $15208 @16.99%
7. Pay off USBank – $21698.08 half at 0%, half at 10.99

I am hoping that once I have a few of these taken care of, without having created more debt to replace them, that I will get some offers for cards with 0% rates, and I can start the money movement game again, to save myself some interest. I keep trying to find the “quick fix”, the easy solution that will get me out of debt – and it just isn’t there. I need to be patient, and vigilant, and realize that it took me a long time to accumulate all this debt, and its going to take me a long time to pay it all off. I’m currently projecting that the USBank debt will be cleared sometime in the middle of 2012.

Pay off all School Loan Debt

I have 2 main sources of student loan debt – somewhere around $65,000 worth of federal loans, consolidated at 6.99%, and approximately $25,000 worth of private education loans, currently unconsolidated and at variable interest rates ranging from 7 – 11%. I can take 60 months of voluntary forebearance on the federal loans, and 24 months on the private loans. I put the federal loans into forebearance for a year last month, and my plan is to keep them there until 2012. I plan not to put the private loans into forebearance, and am currently paying around $176 a month for them. My plan is that after my credit card debt is retired, I attack the private loans, and have them paid off within less than a year – so, early in 2013. I also have one smaller federal loan that somehow didn’t make it into the consolidation. This loan is only at 5% interest, and its only for a few thousand dollars. I am currently paying $40/month towards this loan, which auto deducts out of my checking account every month. By the time I start attacking the private loans, I should have that smaller loan almost paid off anyway – if not, I will throw the extra money at it first, just to simplify my life a little bit.

Save $25,000

This is where things get…tricky. BF and I have had a lot of conversations about our relationship, and the future, and what our plans are. Right now, I would expect that he will propose sometime in the next year. Give us a year to plan the wedding, and that puts it sometime in the (hopefully) fall of 2010. We’ve just gone through watching his parents struggle to pay for his sister’s wedding, and we both agree that that isn’t something we would want to burden either sets of parents with. We are hoping that both sides will contribute some monetary amount towards the festivities, and that we will pay for the majority of it ourselves. We are also in total agreement that this doesn’t need to be the blow-out of the century, and that smaller is better. We desperately want to be able to afford a house sometime in the next 2-3 years.

I get paid twice a month, on the 15th and the 30th. I currently have an auto-deduct of $10/pay period from my checking to my ING savings. I’ve also anticipated what a very minimal raise (3% a year) for the next few years will get me, and rather than adding that new income into my budget, have allocated it all to go straight to savings. Now, clearly, this isn’t going to get me $25,000 in the next 3 years, but it is a sizeable start. I’ve also made up my mind that I must get a part-time job, and that if I sock away $125 extra a week, I will be able to meet this goal. Its hard to know if that is the right thing to do – to save money when you are in debt. I’ve got to assume, though, that a couple with a significant downpayment, plus $10,000 in debt, is a more attractive loan candidate than a debt-free one with no money saved.

So, my goals here are:

1. Get a part-time job
2. Save $125 a week extra in my ING savings
3. Have $25,000 in my wedding/house fund by 12/31/2011

Writing all this out is a bit scary, to say the least. But, at least I know where I stand, and what my plans for the future are. I have to escape this omnipresent feeling that the future is coming, and realize that the future is here, now – and I can do something about it!

Boredom May 20, 2008

I’m having the world’s most boring day at work. Our brand new server has some sort of major problem, and all of our files have been offline for the better part of the last two days. Its extremely frustrating, because I literally have about an hour worth of work to do on a particular project, and then its done, but I can’t do any reviews to it until this server comes back online. So, I’ve been killing time most of the day, working on other, ancillary projects, as well as a little personal project I’ve been meaning to spend some time on.

Using excel, I’ve projected out exactly what needs to be paid every month, and figured out when I will be able to be debt free. By my calculations, I should be consumer debt-free by February, 2011, if I stay the course. I’ve done projections like this before, but they are usually a bit too austere for reality. Its not an exact projection, obviously, but I think that it leaves plenty of room to adjust for unexpected inputs and outputs.

Assumptions:

• I’ve assumed the same base salary from now until 2011, which seems like a very conservative choice, given that we’ve been getting 3% raises every year, as well as the promise of a significant bonus at the end of this year, should the company goals be met.

• I’ve also assumed an additional $800 a month in income, starting 2 months from now. I fully intend to get a part time job to meet this goal, and I think that a part time job, as well as other sources of found/unexpected income will easily add this much to my monthly budget.

• I’ve factored in $600 a month for food/gas/transportation/cell phone/gym membership. This might sound like a lot, but my train pass alone right now is $235/month and my cell phone is $105/month. I’m working to reduce these amounts, and any extra will get transferred over to the debt repayment money.

• I’m leaving myself a cushion in my checking account. I know that it makes me queasy to not have at least $100 in there to cover any emergencies, so I’m deliberately not draining myself entirely.

• I’m not explicitly planning for any other significant influxes of money – tax refunds, bonuses, gifts, etc. I will factor that money in, and readjust, as it comes to me.

I’m not good with total rigidity in a budget/spending plan, so I think this method will work for me. Its got enough structure so that I’m not just flailing about, left to my own devices, but also enough flexibility that I should be able to make it work.

Mental Health Day May 19, 2008

I’ve been away for a few days. Not physically away, really, but mentally. I had a bit of a breakdown on Thursday night, and didn’t end up getting any sleep at all that night. When I woke up on Friday morning, all I could think was that there was just no way that I could face the world that day. I called out of work, and went back to bed for a few more hours.

I spent most of Friday just…thinking. About all the things in my life that are good, and all the things that are not-so-good. About the fact that I feel like I can’t get along with anyone at all right now. About the fact that I feel dissapointed by everything and everyone. And about the fact that, unless I do something about all of this right now, it was all threatening to consume me, and ruin all the good things I’ve worked so hard for – my career, my friendships, my relationships with my family.

Normally, my reaction when I am depressed and upset is to run off to the mall and buy things. Or, even better, to hit all the favorite places online and order a bunch of clothing, books and who knows what else that I don’t really need, all in an effort to make myself better. And, yes, I think that buying things would have temporarily lifted my mood, probably more than the self-analysis and realizations did, but in the end, clearly, its not the healthy decision. In fact, the stress of being in debt is just another factor that is making me unhappy right now.

So, I thought about things, long and hard. I thought about what was worth taking a stand for, and what I needed to let go, to find some peace for myself. And I stayed off the internet, because in some ways, it is just not healthy. There are too many temptations – to spend, to gossip, to jump to conclusions.

I’m not saying that I’ve got it all figured out, but I woke up this morning feeling more productive and at peace than I have in a long, long time.

Numbers Update May 15, 2008

Ah yes, its my favorite (well, one of 2, really) day of the month – payday. I know I was a little depressed to not actually make any progress on the numbers last week when I paid some things using my federal tax return, but I feel much better today. I’ve finally gotten the total debt level under $47,000 – which is the first reduction in that number that I’ve seen, so I’m pretty happy about that. I’ve also got the total number of credit cards that I’m carrying a balance on down to 7 – which definitely feels like an accomplishment for me! Even better is the fact that next pay period, I will be able to pay off another card, bringing the total down to 6, which will include only 1 store card.

I had some hard decisions to make with the money this week. I really desperately wanted to pay off both the Old Navy and the Gap cards in full, but I realized that doing so would leave me with basically less than $40 to get through to the end of the month – including the planned mini-vacation, for which I will definitely want to have some cash. So, I paid $665.16 to the Gap card, and left the Old Navy alone for now, knowing that I will be able to get it next time.

Its hard for me to operate without a little bit of a cushion in my checking account – its not that I don’t know when things are getting auto-debited, but anything under $200 in there makes me feel sort of nervous and uneasy. I’m not entirely sure why, as I’ve never actually over-drawn a checking account – I guess I just want to keep my record clear. So, I’m leaving the extra money alone for now, and will be down to 6 in 2 short weeks!

Please stop turning me into a nag May 13, 2008

The one thing about romantic relationships that always gives me a headache is, well, the financial aspect. I’ve dated guys in the past who had no concept of managing their finances, and who looked to me to provide them with large chunks of change when they got themselves in trouble (yes, I used to be both dumb and naive). I’ve also dated guys who (at the time) made twice what I did, but constantly complained about being broke, and made me feel terrible if I wasn’t paying exactly half. Its particularly hard when you get to that stage where its not just casual dating anymore, and you are living together, or planning to live together, and things start to mingle.

Thats where BF and I are now. We are going to look at an apartment tonight after work, and we are both really really excited about that. What I am less excited about is the idea that in November, his student loans enter repayment – and if he does not find a job by then that pays significantly more than what he makes now, he literally will not be able to both pay the loans and live. And I do not have enough play in my own budget to help him absorb some of the cost.

The solution, of course, is that he get a real job. And he claims that he wants to do this, but when he says things to me like “Well, if I stay here, and get a part-time job that pays an extra $250 a month, I will be able to pay for everything”. I mean, really? Its bad enough as it is that he works Saturday-Wednesday, and I work the more traditional Monday-Friday. But add in a part time job, and we will never see each other.

I just don’t know how to motivate someone without feeling like I am nagging them to death. I’ve mentioned it a million times. I’m stressing myself out about it. I need him to do this, for our relationship to survive and flourish, but mostly for himself, and I just don’t know how to make that happen.