My Debt Blog

Over the last roughly 24 hours I hit a breaking point and budgeting is driving me nuts. There are simply too many expenses that must be met early this month that cannot fit in the current realm of things. I don’t want to be hit with any bank fees for not having enough money to cover checks that are now hot. To stop the pressure and ease my stress I am removing $300 from my emergency fund. I do not want to drop the EF below 1k because it will rain again in the future.

What is making things partially difficult is trying to get my wife to be on the same page here with our financial situation. The other problem is she is still in school trying to finish up her masters and is very stressed out over getting homework and such done for classes. I want to talk about our financial situation just brings more stress and she really does not want to take part of it. To her we have this 1k just sitting out there that could make up for any shortfall so I should use that. My rebuttal is the car insurance bill is not an emergency expense and we just need to watch where money is going this month so normal household expenses are met. If we burn through the 1k emergency fund every time something starts smoking, it will be gone very quickly.

Either way though we need to get a budget figured out quickly because she is student teaching in the fall and our income will decrease slightly. I think what it will come down to is I might have to get a second job to keep things the way they are, or we have to live on less. Next month does not have any huge expenses other than the mortgage so we will use July to practice playing budget. Something has to give here and I think our lifestyle is about to be rocked here in the coming weeks.

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Every now and then I see ads about getting a loan from a local credit union. I have always used banks for my loans from the beginning. Car loans, student loans, mortgage, line of credit, you name it. What is the big deal with a credit union?

I of course did a Google on credit unions versus banks. The two are very similar in the sense that they deal with the same thing, money. Credit unions are member based and privately owned while banks anyone can use and they are federally insured. First you would have to become a member of the credit union in order to use its services based on if you’re eligible for membership. Banks don’t care who you are and it is usually easy to open up an account. They both offer similar types of accounts, checking, debit card, even online access for most. With the two being so similar, what is the advantage?

The big difference I found is that a credit union is non profit while banks charge fees and make money for the shareholders. What does a credit union do with money it makes? Members see the benefits in interest and better loan rates. I suppose if I needed a loan of sorts I might consider joining one of these credit unions to see if I could get a better deal.

Question to readers: What do you use, a credit union or bank and why?

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