My Debt Blog

Maria over at Cents and Sensibility tagged me to play the Six Word Memoir meme. I’ve seen these things go around PF blogs before, so why not play along?

Here are the rules…

1. Write your own six word memoir.
2. Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you want.
3. Link to the person who tagged you in your post.
4. Tag at least 5 more blogs.
5. Leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play.

My memoir is…

Life is hard, it gets better.

Instead of dwelling on the negative in life I like to feel positive and optimistic. Sometimes life throws us lemons and we have to make lemonade. Don’t wait for someone else out there to fix your life, only you can improve it. I’m an optimistic realist, everything is what it is but always gets better.

I will tag:

1. Creating a Life by Destroying Debt
2. Dog Ate My Finances
3. Living Almost Large
4. It’s No Joke I’m So Broke
5. The Bright Side of Debt

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After a bit of a hiatus and discussion with my wife, I’m bringing the blog back online. This blog started out as a way for me to openly discuss finances and get a different view of things, but public opinion can be harsh. I’ve apologized to my wife for keeping the blog very private, even though it was supposed to have more to do with me than us. Being that we are married and both in it together, our finances require us to work together. I wasn’t getting much of anywhere before because of lack of communication.

Bringing the blog back online will also bring some changes.

1. I’m not sure about how much detail I will go into regarding my postings about specific personal matters.
2. There won’t be any ranting about things I cannot change or what is in the past.
3. I want to also give out more advice on various things the way I see it.
4. We both have debt that we’re going to address, and have made great progress even this month.
5. I’m trying to look at things being an optimistic realist, in that things are what they are but will always get better.

If it’s your first time here thank you for visiting, and if you used to be a frequent visitor, thank you for coming back.

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We’re finally in January of 2008. Last year I started my journey to get out of debt in March, and I’m only a few months away from this blog’s one year anniversary. Too much threw me for a loop and December wasn’t a month I was excited about. Christmas cost way too much and the car insurance bill I just wasn’t prepared to deal with.

The primary reason things got more difficult to deal with last year was my wife went from making decent money in the spring, half of what she was making in the summer, to absolutely no income in the fall. Logic and reasoning would be that spending should go down as income goes down the opposite is what ended up happening. I think between the two of us about 2k was spent on Christmas and the holidays in general. My credit card was much abused and my next plastic pinch update will be rather embarrassing.

I need some goals though and the first is to figure out where I stand in a financial aspect. My file box is a mess and needs to be cleaned up too so it will be easier to find stuff. The spreadsheet I use as a check register hasn’t been updated since I went on my vacation, which was the entire second half of December. These things need to get back in order again for me to be able to feel back in control of the money and rebuild the EF that got drained in December. For those loyal readers, thanks for your continued support as I try to get back on my feet.

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I’ve taken some time off from the blog due to Christmas and I just don’t feel like posting details. With that said I did want to conclude 2007 and welcome 2008. I probably spent way too much money in December that I am too scared to look at the damage right now. On a positive note, my wife graduated and is officially able to be a teacher. She will take substitute positions until something more permanent comes around. We do know that she will have to make payments on her student loans in 6 months though. Along with tackling debt, I hope we can work together when it comes to money in 2008.

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First I apologize to the frequent visitors of my blog for my lack of posts this past week. After putting up some posts about my wife’s car being broken into and her purse stolen, most comments were supportive but some were rude. Yes my wife has some expensive tastes and likes some particular brands that are not exactly cheap. Maybe you would not buy these things, because you are convinced you’ll find something just as good at the dollar store or Wal-Mart, leave it alone.

I took a week off of work, the blog, and let everything settle. Where did I go? My sister-in-law got married this past Saturday, and the 4th of July was last week, my wife and I stayed at her parents for the week. Our only real costs was the extra gas to travel and the gift, but for the most part it was nice to block out the finances for a week and take care of things when I got back.

I’m well aware that if I just lived under a rock for a few months, came out to stock up on the necessities to survive, my debt would be gone in no time. I’ve been at this debt reduction thing for awhile, my focus wavers all over the place. It will take quite a few years of working on paying off these debts to be completely debt free. I didn’t get into debt overnight and I can’t expect it to be gone tomorrow. Sure I could cut my lifestyle down to nearly nothing, but lifestyle has that life part in there for a reason.

My wife and I talked about selling our house. It probably isn’t the best thing in the financial aspects to be selling the house at this time, so why should we do it? Some people work a job they absolutely hate for years just because they cannot live without the income. That is living to work, not working to live. We live in an area that currently isn’t doing anything for us because we’re much younger than our neighbors and don’t have a family. The draw and excitement to enjoy our 20s right now is in the city. When we bought the house last year it was to move away from a very lacking area we settled after college. Instead of feeling like we were wasting money on rent, it would make more sense to own something. Having this house a year, owning is much more difficult than renting. If we can sell this house and go back to renting, it is part bittersweet because it’s our first house, yet a big relief in terms of cost savings in the long run, even though the tax deduction and ownership of something is gone.

Right now I don’t have much of a long term plan or any goals. I’m kind of just letting things go the direction they are since everything has detoured anyway. There will be an update soon regarding my debt reduction, or increase, whatever the case may be soon. At any rate, I’m still here.

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