The Impact of Vices on your Debt
January 10th, 2010
We all have our vices, from the indulgent to the down right bad for us, having vices isn’t necessarily a problem but their impact could be. For me a vice is something that you do that is something that you don’t need to do that has some negative connotation with it. For example smoking and drinking are clearly vices in my opinion but this can translate to pretty much anything that you indulge in that you don’t need to. The Starbucks coffee that you have every morning becomes a vice when you spend $5 for a specialty coffee every day. Vices by themselves are not necessarily evil or bad, we all have them but the important factor is knowing their cost and impact to our lives, financially and otherwise.
The cost of vices
Most vices come with some form of cost from hidden costs or ones that are clearly known; if you think that your vices don’t have costs you’re likely quite mistaken. The obvious costs are to partake in the vice in the first place such as for smoking, drinking, and eating out all the time, there is a clear up front cost that is required.
Additionally there is often a hidden cost that is associated with our vices and these costs are much harder to measure because often these are intangible. With vices such as smoking the long term likelihood that you’re going to damage your health starts carrying a cost with it (especially in countries with privatized health care). You spend most of your life paying someone good money in order to be able to smoke and then it makes you sick forcing you to pay extra money in order to maybe get better.
But the hidden cost is not always easy to find, what about the opportunities lost as a result of a vice? How many people have lost an opportunity to show off their full potential because they were hung over or tired because they were out drinking the night before? The answer is likely quite a few. There are numerous scenarios that you can invent where a person could loose an opportunity because of one of their vices and these lost opportunities are very difficult to identify let alone quantify. Another hidden cost is in the lost interest on the money you spend on your vice. If instead of spending your money on your vices you paid down your debt or invested the money you could reduce the amount of interest you pay or make money from the interest. That interest be it extra paid on consumer credit or lost interest gained on investments is another intangible cost of participating in a vice.
The impact of vices on Debt
Now in my opinion one of the most significant impacts that a vice can have is to your debt. Lets face it, if you’ve got a vice this isn’t something that comes up once a year or even once a month but its a regular thing. If you’re a smoker then its a constant thing, and in reality an addiction, you’re paying to keep doing this vice all the time. Because you’re paying money all the time for this vice you’re not able to pay your debt down as fast (or possibly at all).
I think to really illustrate this I’ll use myself as an example, I am currently a smoker and I smoke about a pack every 2-3 days. Smokes are no longer as cheap as they used to be and I’m paying about $10 per pack (sometimes more) which means that over the course of a year I’ll smoke over $1500 worth of cigarettes. This $1,500 is money that I have literally burnt away in order to keep my vice going, its also money that could have paid down my debt. This is a very simple illustration because it doesn’t take into account any of the potential hidden costs that can come out of my smoking or even the additional interest I’m going to pay as a result of not being able to pay my debt down faster.
My personal struggle with my vices
Vices simply cost us loads of money that could help ease our financial situations considerably. Personally I have struggled with my vices in the past, I enjoy them and with the exception of smoking they’re not actively hurting me. I like to have a few drinks now and then, I smoke, I like to go to the casino once in a while; in other words I’m a normal person with some vices. I know that I can save a lot of money by cutting out anything to do with these vices or at the least reduce them, but that doesn’t make it any easier to stop. There is a very addictive quality to many vices, at least for me, and stopping them is very hard.
I have tackled a few demons such as gambling, when I was younger I would go semi-frequently to the casino with friends to play some cards and for the most part I would loose some money. While rarely was this a lot it added up and prevented me from clearing my debt. I have grown up a little and I understand that this is mostly a loosing venture and now I go maybe once or twice a year with a very defined budget. It’s a vice that has become an evening out for the sake of fun – essentially its become an entertainment cost.
But I still struggle with my other vices specifically the smoking and drinking. The smoking because it’s an addiction that I can see hurting me both financially and physically and until recently the drive to quit just hasn’t been strong enough. This is a vice that I simply want to tackle and be done with. I want my $1,500 per year to go to other things. The drinking is a vice I struggle with not because of the health or social impact, while I drink frequently I don’t drink a lot the problem is the cost of the alcohol is starting to bother me.
Vices by themselves are not necessarily bad but we need to keep in mind their cost, both tangible and intangible when participating in them. If you are heavily in debt and want to get out of debt then you need to consider tackling your vices in order to find the extra money to speed up the repayment process. Personally I am looking at my vices as too costly and they will be where I look to find more money to save and to repay my debts even though it maybe a challenge.
Posted in Budgeting and Planning, Commentary | No Comments
Year of Less
January 3rd, 2010
If I were to put a statement on this past year it would be that it was the ‘Year of Busy’, it felt like I was running around a lot doing a great many things and in the end I felt like I was stretched extremely thin. The goal for this year will be to make it the ‘Year of Less’! This past year I read Leo Babauta’s book Power of Less
I find with myself that I like to set my goals extremely high and then inevitably they aren’t achieved or the project is started and never quite finished. This blog has been witness to a few of these grandiose goals such as my posting of my weekly budgets to goals from previous years where I have tried to save X or Y where the numbers were rather large. So this year I am going to take a slightly different approach, I am going to focus on fewer things and by doing that I am hoping to achieve more of them.
Further to that point here is my list of goals for the year, I’ve kept the list to 5 items. I think I could accomplish a great deal more than just these 5 items but I think by starting with these and not putting more down I have a better chance of success
- Quit Smoking and drink less
- Get my finances in order
- Find my passion
- Get my side business going
- Declutter the house
Each one of these items is important to me and I think that in the long run I would be happier by achieving these than anything else.
Quitting Smoking and Drinking less
This will be the goal that I start working on first because it has the most immediate impact and at the same time it has the farthest reaching impact. The smoking part is in my opinion extremely obvious. Smoking is extremely bad for you and I have never hidden the fact that I smoke and that I would rather be a non-smoker. There is no cutting down on this part of the goal I am sick of it and I don’t want to do it anymore. The second half of this goal is a bit more of what I would call fuzzy and it will tie into the other goals to some extent. I like to have a few beers at the end of a long day, while I don’t drink excessively I do drink fairly frequently. The drinking by itself is not a problem, I enjoy having those couple beers a day, what I believe is a problem is the fact that this habit is extremely expensive and I don’t think I need to do it.
Get Finances in Order
In many ways this goal is the a very significant part of the reason why this blog exists and has existed so long, unfortunately I am still struggling with certain aspects of my finances for example I am not saving much money and I am still carrying a fairly substantial consumer debt load. While my financial situation has improved over the years its still not great and could be a lot better than it is.
- Savings – increase savings to 15% of my paycheck by end of April (currently its at about 5%)
- Credit card debt – reduce debt by 20% by the end of the year (this would mean that by the end of the year I would be below 10K)
Those two measurable goals are something that I would like to achieve, I also think that I could do a lot better than this but I would like to start small and keep myself focused. Also this will give me a bit more time to truly define what getting my finances in order really means for me. I pay my bills on time but I have not been making much headway financially and I just want to make sure I tackle it in a way that is appropriate for me.
Find my Passion
Over the past year I have started delve into myself and try to figure out what drives me and what my passions are and for this upcoming year I want to continue to do this. While I don’t know if I’ll be able to find my passion within this calendar year I do want to continue the process of trying to discover what they might be and what I can be doing about them.
Get my side business going
As part of trying to find my passion, and finding myself in some ways, I have discovered that I don’t want to do live the rat race life until I am ready to retire (or die). I want to be able to try new things and to experiment I also don’t want to be a slave to someone else for my bread and butter. I have had a few ideas for starting a side business for a few years but I have never really done anything about it other than dream and talk. This year the goal will be to get this moving once and for all. The worst thing that can happen is it fails.
I have a couple ideas that are potential candidates and I have decided to focus on one of them to drive the idea forward and see what happens. If I make some money off of this that would be great, if I try it and nothing happens then really I am no worse off, but if I try this and it works then this will become the starting point for additional income streams.
One of the starting ideas behind this blog and its name is was to have one million dollars by the time I turn 35, I am now 32 so this is an achievement that is becoming harder and harder to fulfill and I believe that getting off my ass and doing something about a side business is the way to go. Over the next couple months I will be working to getting this going and while I don’t want to blog about it just yet I will once the idea is in place.
What I would like to achieve from this goal is that by the end of the year I would like to have $1000 in income from a side business coming in monthly.
Declutter the house
This goal ties in more to the concept of the year of less, we simply have too much crap and I don’t want to bother with it anymore or worry about it. Just by scanning around the room I am in right now I can see things that we really don’t need like the extra phone and charger stand that aren’t being used and I believe the phone doesn’t even work anymore or the printer that is stacked on the shelf because we’ve replaced it with a new laser printer. I am never going to buy new ink cartridges for it and thus never use it. These are just a couple examples that I was able to find by looking around the room and I am sure that the house is full of items such as these that need to be removed. The end result is that i am hoping to have fewer things to worry about and have to deal with. If anything can be sold or donated then it will be what can’t will be thrown out. I will attempt to initiate this goal slowly because it is not as important as the others I still want to achieve it.
Will I be able to accomplish all of these five goals over the course of the year? The real answer is I don’t know, the one about finding my passion might the one that brings the house of cards down, but I believe that I can and should be able to achieve these. If I am successful then I can always add more items to the list.
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2009 A Personal Year in Review
January 1st, 2010
When it comes to the end of the year a lot of people look back at the year that has happened and reflect. For many this doesn’t go past: “wow its new years again, where did the year go.” Personally I think this is a good time to stop and look back at your year, this is where you stop and look at the good and bad – this is the time to be impartial take the good as good and the bad as bad. There is no reason to see what could have been or what opportunities were missed and why. This just leads to dwelling on what might have been rather than on what was and learning from this.
My year was busy, it was both good and bad and there are a lot of places that different things could have happened but they didn’t and I can’t change any of that. This year really has been a journey for me and I believe that I have grown a lot in the year.
The Good.
The good is really great in my opinion I got a chance to watch my daughter grow from an infant that barely recognized me as her father to being daddy’s little girl. She’s walking and learning to talk and you can clearly see her growing day by day both in height and size but also in cognitive ability. It’s amazing to watch this process; this little person is what has kept me going during some of the tough times throughout the year. Seeing her smile light up when I picked her up at the end of the day really made the trivial worries of the day go away.
The other good is that I have grown personally, I have started to recognize that I have a lot of potential and I can get moving into a direction (as part of this process I am aiming to find my passions) while this is a process that has started it is not one that has finished. I am still learning who I am now, not who I was when I was in high school or when I first started working. The reality is that we all change over time and in my case I hadn’t actually seen much of this change so the discovery process is educational, interesting and at times a bit frightening. Overall I am getting a much better sense of who I am right now and who and what I would like to be in the not to distant future. There is much more room for growth.
Other than these two things there was a lot of good, professionally and personally even though there were challenges – work has been really good and I have learnt a great deal. I made new friends and kept in touch with some close friends and I am glad I was able to do this.
The Bad
There is rarely good without the bad. This year has been tough in many aspects: juggling work and everything required for the baby along with maintaining a healthy relationship with my friends, family and wife has been hard. It feels that I have been stretched very thin at times and the thing that has really suffered is the time that I used to spend for me. It feels that over the year there has been no time to recharge and the batteries have been running a bit on the low side. It feels like all of the items that need to be done compete with each other for my limited time and the net result is that I am not able to give as much attention to any one thing as I would like. While at the upper level this doesn’t sound like such a bad thing but it has at times frustrated me and made me feel very down to the point where I think I was bordering on being depressed.
Other than this there was a few other bad things that happened illnesses and lost jobs and friends that have become virtually lost. This is the stuff of life and I haven’t dwelled on any one of these item. I have simply tried making it through them keeping my head on its shoulders. Thankfully nothing really bad happened that I could not deal with.
The biggest bad thing from this year was the fact that there simply seemed to be too much to do and too little time to do it, everything seemed rushed and overly busy. I know that this is a common theme but it was one of the biggest downfalls from the past year, everything needed to be done right away and there didn’t seem to be much time for anything other than rushing around.
The Other
There was some stuff that was neither good nor bad it was just stuff that happened like my finances. they were maintained with some semblance of normality, there was neither serious growth nor loss and in many ways it seems that a lot of stuff just stayed status quo this year. In many ways this year has been the year of stabilization and work. At times this has come off like being in a rut but over the past few years there has been a lot of ups and downs so having a year of a lot of stability and sameness is not a bad thing.
Looking to the future
Along with taking stock of the year that just passed this is also the time for looking to the future and this year is no different for me. I have been thinking about all of the things that I would like to work on in the various facets of my life and the more I think about it the bigger the list gets! But if this last year is any indication there is simply not enough time to do everything especially all at once so the upcoming year will be the year of less in my view. My goals for the year will be fewer and smaller at least initially and if I manage to accomplish some of these goals I can get to the next items on the list. I’ll be posting about these in after the new year.
The year seems to have gone by in a flash and now its time to start another year and unlike this past year I do intend to make some changes, even if they’ll be small ones but I don’t intend to continue to repeat the same actions over and over expecting different results. I wish all of you a safe and happy new year!
Posted in Commentary | 1 Comment
Overspending at Christmas – Now What?
December 27th, 2009
It seems that every year over the holidays I end up spending more money that I was originally intending; maybe I am too generous and give people too many gifts or maybe I should plan better for the holidays (possibly both). This year I had a list and worked from the list but I still managed to overspend a little. I bought my wife a couple gifts that were a bit on the larger side because I know she wanted those items (a camera and some jewelery), now its time to deal with my spending. Have you found yourself in this situation where you spent more money than you were intending and now its time to scramble a little?
I overspent now what?
This year I spent probably 300$ more than I was thinking and this went onto one of my credit cards, now this isn’t a huge amount but I am going to have to adjust my budgeting over the next few weeks to make sure that this doesn’t have a long term effect. An easy way to cover this would be to deposit an extra 100$ per pay onto the credit card to cover the $300 which would mean that by the end of January I would be back to square one. If you can’t cover the extra hundred per pay deposit $50 or whatever you can. You can manage to pay a little more on the credit cards in order to cover the extra spending fairly quickly.
Now if you can’t deposit more then you’ll need to be a bit more creative and adjust your spending more significantly, remember no one put a gun to your head and forced you to spend the money, you did that. If you’re in big trouble after the holidays then what I just suggested above will be more drastic. In the new year you might need to cut down on spending and put more onto your credit cards or you might need to work out some kind of a plan with them. Remember don’t beat yourself up over this, I know that this is something that I did in the past, learn from your mistakes and correct the problem (it will likely take time so you’ll need to be patient). If you need to there are organizations that can help – though if Christmas pushed you this far over the edge you were probably there already. Don’t panic it can be solved (most likely)
Savings Account!
What really saved me this year is the fact that in September I started depositing $50 per pay into a savings account, I knew that Christmas was coming up and I would likely need a bit of extra cash. This really saved me and where in previous years I would be really scrambling for all of January trying to figure out how to pay my bills this year I just have to pay back an extra $300. When you’re in debt its hard to contemplate saving money that could be going to pay down your debt and I’m sure there are people that would disagree with me but always always set aside a little money into a savings account. You never know when you might need that money. All I was doing is saving $50 per pay for a few months and while I don’t have any spare money kicking around after the holidays I am not panicking.
Be concious of your spending and don’t neglect savings.
Posted in Commentary, Debt, Financial Situation | No Comments
Happy Holidays!
December 26th, 2009
Happy Holidays everyone; I really hope that each and every one of you has had a great holiday (regardless of if you celebrate it or not).
Don’t forget that its not about the gifts (though they are always nice) but its about the small things like spending time with the family or taking the day off to do nothing but watch movies and recharge yourself. Whatever it is it doesn’t have to be monetary and in fact most of the most memorable moments I find aren’t.
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A slow Re-Invention of Self – Finding my Passion
December 11th, 2009
The past few months have been a bit on the challenging side for me, actually I would say that this past year has a bit challenging for me. Between juggling all of my real and perceived responsibilities I haven’t had much time to myself and I have been feeling a bit of a void that is symbolized by a lack of passion and direction. At times I have been worn thing and others I have been unhappy but I think the biggest thing is that I don’t feel that I am living up to my own potential.
By no means do I think that I am a failure I just think that there is something I am missing that will take me to a place where I feel that if I am not working at my potential I am working towards it and my internal success recognition will become based on this rather than seeing the results of others and comparing myself to them personally and professionally. I am happy and grateful about many things in my life and without these I think I would be both a lesser man and to put it frankly pretty bloody miserable.
Passion
Over the past probably year I have been reading about passion and trying slowly and quietly to find my own. One of the biggest problems that I have found in trying to nail this down is that while a lot of books in the self help area deal with success and passion theymerely state that people will find their greatest success and happiness by finding their passion. The reality is that I have never been taught to look deep within myself to find out what is my life’s calling is or to find out the things that will drive me to get up in the morning a couple hours before everyone wakes up and keep me up at night to put in that little bit of extra effort.
How does one find ones passion? There are a few ways to do it and these will depend on the person and their circumstances. For me this has been a slow process and one filled with this slow nagging feeling that something isn’t quite right (and its not the burrito I had at lunch). Its a feeling that is telling me that my current measure of success could be better but unfortunately that feeling doesn’t tell me what needs to be changed. So I have been exploring the concept of having a passion and trying to see what I need to do to find this.
In some ways this process has been a little discouraging; while I’m starting to feel that I have made some progress I have discovered that rather than being closer to finding my passion I am in reality further away than when I was younger (both as a teen and a child). My interests and hobbies have atrophied over the years to the point question what are your hobbies makes me cringe slightly because the answer has become “I’m not really sure”.
I think a person can have many passions both over the course of their lives and at the same time. There are people out there who accomplish momentous achievements in many areas seemingly at the same time. Are these people some magical beings that just happen to know the secret handshake that allows them to do this? No. They are incredibly talented and they understand themselves their interests and what drives them and how to motivate themselves.
My Past
You’re reading this blog because I’ve always had some interest in money and I’ve always battled my own demons when it comes to managing my own money. This is an interest that I know about but one that has suffered because of business and a general lack of passion when it comes to anything. For a little while I contemplated simply closing shop on this site but I enjoy it and I believe that it has helped me grow (and hopefully helped the odd reader). This got me thinking about how to find my passion… when I started this site it got started with a spark an idea that has fitfully existed for a little over three years. I haven’t had many of these ideas lately so the starting point to find out what some of my interests are was to go backwards in time to when I had more interests and to see if there are any passions there that can be cultivated with some time.
If you live the 9 to 5 grind pause for a moment and think back to when you were a child can you remember all of the things you were interested in? Chances are that with a little thought you’ll be amazed at all the things you did then compared to now. That’s the idea that is driving this part of my slow reinvention.
Fear
Now I don’t think I could really talk about finding my passion without at least mentioning fear because I have slowly learnt over the past year that fear drives me in many strange ways that I’m not really all that happy about. I think that I’m not the only one in this situation either; there are so many people living their lives in a rut that a whole industry has come to exist to help them (aka self help). How am I going to deal with these fears? The reality is that right now I’m not sure I know that I am going to have to because living my life unhappy in a rut is not a way to live and I will not let a fear keep me back.
The problem with these fears is that often times I don’t think its a fear that is driving a decision but something else like caution, prudence or being realistic about something. Now at times those things will keep you from making a bad decision but that isn’t always the case. I think that all too often a choice is avoided because of some misguided fear that really should be addressed. The other thing is that I’ve found that my self confidence has been really low for years, while on the surface its high deep down it’s been pretty low and I think a lot of that is rooted in these misguided fears. Along with identifying my interests and hopefully passions I will need to tackle my fears and the demons that come with them.
Going forward
If you’ve made it this far I congratulate you, this is a personal finance blog not a self help blog and something about what I’ve said has sparked an interest in you. Thank you. This is not going to be an instant change or fix and hopefully it doesn’t take me too long to figure it out but it is something that needs to be done for my own peace of mind. What does this mean for the site? Well hopefully it translates to more posts because I have determined that this is an area that I have been interested and want to continue to explore.
Posted in Commentary, News/Misc | 1 Comment
Suvival Mode
November 5th, 2009
Most people have some form of debt, from a lot of consumer debt to a mortgage, its become an accepted fact that everyone had some. Typically we make an effort to pay this debt down and keep moving forward. Take for example my situation I’ve got about 12K in credit card debt which I can slowly pay down over the next few years without altering my lifestyle at all. I don’t have to make any sacrifice to keep everything going the way that it is and I believe that a lot of people fall into this category.
A couple days ago I read a post over at Money Crush about Getting out of ‘Survival Mode’ and this got me thinking about this so called Survival Mode. For me being in survival mode means you do anything and everything you can in order to save money, presumably to survive. Thankfully I haven’t been that situation for a while now but I have been there before and I know that you act totally differently towards money when it really matters. The thought that came to mind was how quickly would I be able to get rid of my debts if I were able to get into survival mode and stay there until EVERYTHING was paid off?
As much as I like to muse about questions like this the reality is I probably wouldn’t be able to stay there very long. I enjoy my lifestyle even if it means that I’m going to carry debt for a while. Each day I spend money on things that I don’t really need like a candy bar or coffee and I could easily do without these little temptations. Even if I didn’t enter a true survival mode I think it might be possible to enter a pseudo survival mode where you question each purchase with: do I need this purchase to survive. I think that by questioning each purchase like this and really focusing on survival elements you can save yourself a great deal of money.
Being in the situation where you have to stretch every dollar just to survive not a fun situation to be in but it does give you an appreciation for what you do and don’t have and what really matters. In the grand scheme of things if you’re floating credit card debt because you like your $5 a day latte it equates to being pretty dumb and not something that you should be complaining about.
Posted in Commentary, Debt | No Comments
My Frivolous Purchase
November 2nd, 2009
This past weekend I decided to invest a little money in a very worthy cause, myself! I made what many people might consider a rather frivolous purchase. I bought myself a mini laptop, a Dell 10v specifically and so far I have to say I’m fairly impressed with it. I didn’t make this purchase lightly, I’ve been eyeing getting myself one of these computers for a while now and it was time.
Every now and then you have to treat yourself to something nice or all the money in the world isn’t really worth collecting. I commute a fair amount and although I do have a work laptop I am not going to use it for my personal stuff so when the idea of these mini laptops started to gain popularity I have to say I was rather intrigued. That was close to a year ago and since then they’ve become all the rage which is great for me because the price has gone down. I purchased this little item from a big box store for $399+ taxes which might seem high but it came in a custom color and with a 6 cell battery. The net result is I would have paid a similar price directly from Dell.
While some people will lament the fact that I spent that much money on a luxury item this wasn’t a purchase made overnight or on a whim. It also wasn’t a purchase that was made on credit. I have learnt my lesson when it comes to spending my money on the geek toys; save up, wait and if you still want it then purchase it. I waited over a year and I saved up the money for this so there won’t be any credit card bills coming in the mail nor will this weeks groceries be on the lighter side.
The one thing that made me second guess this purchase is the fact that I could have paid down my debt a bit more rather than paying minimums. But as I mentioned earlier you have to be able to treat yourself every now and then. I haven’t purchased anything that was specifically for me and me only in… probably close to two years, maybe longer. There is a couple benefits to this purchase other than the geek factor and that is that I’ll have a bit more portability with my computing life (thankfully I’m not a facebook user or I might have to update my profile everytime I find a new hotspot), there are a couple projects that i would like to work on and this might remove any additional excuses that I have for not doing them.
Now a question for my readers – have you ever treated yourself, and I’m not talking about the latte that you’re sipping while browsing through your daily reads, I’m talking about a purchase that you wanted but could have lived without that was more significant. Did you wait? Did you save up for it? Did you feel any type of remorse or regret?
Posted in Commentary, News/Misc | 3 Comments
The Quiet Financial Blog
October 26th, 2009
Over the past couple months things have really quieted down on the site, I think there’s been a grand total of 2 posts in almost three months. No I haven’t given up on the site though I will admit I really didn’t have much to say for a couple months and it got to the point where I wasn’t even thinking about blogging. In the past couple weeks the thought to jump back on the site and write again has been coming back to mind. Now there won’t be any grand proclamations about what will and won’t happen or how great or badly I’ve been doing.
In some respects things have been great, my daughter turned one at the beginning of the month and she’s been doing awesome. She’s been bringing joy into my life every day since her birth. Yes some days are tougher than others, lets be realistic its parenthood not every day will be perfect. The magic is the fact that when I see her face when I pick her up the smile she gives me and the excitement I get is enough to make it all worth while. Being a parent really has taught me a lot from resposibility to seeing the simplicity and joy in life.
On the financial front things have improved and stayed the same at the same time. Yes I’m still carrying debt (close to three months of quiet isn’t going to erase that much debt), but I have managed to start building my savings. The debt is being maintained and slowly lowered while at the same time I’ve managed to save up a small amount of money (about $1,000). While my successes and general status quo in the financial arena have not been stellar there hasn’t been any regression which is a good sign by itself.
For a while I was torn about the site, I didn’t have anything I wanted to say, and I contemplated shutting it down. But I do like writing about personal finance and my finances. If I can somehow convince one kid or one person not to make the mistakes I made then all the writing would have been a success. So I would like to start writing again, it might take a little while to get topics flowing again but I want to write so I will just like I will continue to make the small steps to improve my financial situation – even a small step in the right direction is a good one.
Posted in Commentary, Financial Situation, News/Misc | No Comments
The Financial Baby Steps Continue
September 22nd, 2009
In my last post a little over a month ago I talked about maintaining focus on debt through baby steps and although I haven’t been posting I have managed to maintain this attitude and approach for the most part. I fell off when it came to the posting because of a great many reasons most of which are not really all that relevant on a Personal Finance blog but what I have managed to do is to keep making the small dents in the debt. Today I updated the little tracker that shows how much credit card debt I have and over the couple months that I’ve had that in place I’ve managed to reduce my debt by $585. While this isn’t a huge amount when compared to the full amount it does show continuous progress.
In addition to these small baby steps in repaying my debt I’ve also managed to set aside a little over $500 in a mutual fund account. Again this isn’t quite enough in case something came up and I needed the money it is a baby step in the right direction. For years I’ve managed to save absolutely nothing and now I’ve got a few hundred dollars invested in a mutual fund and this will continue to grow.
Seeing the results of these baby steps over time can be really motiviating (at least it is for me). Less than two months ago I had nothing saved and had more consumer debt than I do now. Just seeing these small successes and seeing them add up makes me realize that yes the debt is fairly large but it can and will be tackled. The best part of these successes is that I didn’t make any huge adjustments to my lifestyle or any sacrifices just a few small changes. Now I’m confident I can make a few more changes to continue the baby steps and speed up the process of saving and debt reduction.
Posted in Debt, Financial Situation | 2 Comments
