Mobody’s Business – The Finance Edition

I have recently signed up for Revolution MoneyExchange, which is an alternative site to paypal. They are trying to build up users, so they are basically giving away $25 just for signing up. You can cash out the money even if you never use the service. (I think there is a small fee of a couple of bucks to get the money by check, no fee for bank transfer) Anything that sticks it to paypal, and gives you free money, is worth a look in my opinion. And if you sign up using this link, you get $25 bucks, and I get $10, woohoo.

I think its important to set some goals in my attempts to get out of debt. They are not much different from what I have read elsewhere. I just need to put them down to keep some focus.

• Live within my means, do not spend more than I make.
• Make a budget
• Pay off credit cards
• Pay off car
• Save money for retirement
• Stop spending on frivoulous items and things I do not need
• Stop eating out at restaurants as much

I’m sure I will have to revise this list. My best friend of 30+ years and I have been talking about what we will do when we retire. For the past 10 years or so that dream has included opening a restaurant or a hotel with a restaurant. As part of that I started setting aside a small amount of money each month toward that goal. I think a good plan to avoid failure is to have something to work for. This is what I am working for.

I’m so broke I can’ t pay attention.

Why am I broke? Because I didn’t pay attention.

Last December I had an epiphany. For the longest time, I have been in serious denial about my financial situation. I can handle it, I pay my bills, I make good money. So how did I end up nearly $150,000.00 in debt? I ignored it, I made all kinds of excuses. But the bottom line is I did it to myself. I should know better, I am an accountant for pity’s sake! I should know better.  It took hitting absolute rock bottom for me to realize that I was never going to be able to survive much less pay off this debt the way I was going.  I realized that I actually had to see the where I was going with this, so I decided to start this blog to chronicle my journey out of debt.

The crisis that put me here started just before Thanksgiving, when I was out of town and I didn’t open a bill that would have told me that my minimum payment was $32 more than the automatic payment I had sent. That took all my fine balance transfers from around 4.5% to a whopping 35%, my minimum payment, just for that card, from about $300 to well over a thousand. That was just one card. Just to keep from going into a complete meltdown I had to re-mortgage the house (consolidating 3 of my cc’s) for $80,000. Bringing the payments down to a manageable fixed monthly payment. I still have a long way to go, and many other debts to deal with.

For months I was playing this game, cash advancing one card to pay another, but my time ran out. The moment I knew I really hit rock bottom when I received a credit offer in the mail at 96% interest (yep, really). I kept asking myself why someone who has always paid their bills (granted late a few times) never missed payments, isn’t worth anything in credit. For a while I felt like I was worth more dead than alive and if my life insurance didn’t have a suicide clause I would have seriously considered it. Then I came back to reality, stopped feeling sorry for myself and now I have committed myself to earnestly paying off my debts. So to keep myself honest, I am throwing my personal journey out to whoever cares to read it, while I spend the next few years digging out of this mess I made.

Well after a few missed starts, I have decided to go on with chronicling my personal finance journey.  It seems kind of daunting when there are literally hundreds of PF blogs out there.  I hit a crisis of major proportions in December of 2007, and decided at that time that a serious change was in order.  So, for the next few years, I am going to keep track of how I am getting out of the mess I made.  In the next few posts, I will start with how I got here, what I am doing to get out of it, successes, failures, attempts and anything else that really strikes my fancy.  Hope you find something in here useful.

Mo