Footprints on the Moon

Debt Chart

Overall, a very good month! You see a couple additions… one being Nelnet, which is in forbearance, so that’s interest charges. Capital One now has the balance of the MyPoints card which I transferred over both to put it at a lower interest rate and to consolidate my monthly payments a bit. Capital One also gained an annual payment that I forgot to prepare for.

As you can see, I did manage to pay off the ER bill last month. Writing a $1,110.00 check was slightly painful, but it’s nice to have that one gone! Only a year and a half after the ER visit… Now I’m focusing on the car loan. It doesn’t have the highest interest rate (the lowest, apart from the student loans) or the lowest balance (again, it’s towards the top of the list, apart from the student loan), so it’s not next on the list of what “should” be paid according to most personal finance theories. But that’s why they call it PERSONAL finance. It’s the bill that bugs me the most, as I’ve paid off this car once before, and I’d like to own it free and clear again sooner rather than later. It’s the one I’m definitely the most motivated to make payments on. I think I may be able to finish paying it off by April. We’ll see.

I’m also looking over the list and trying to decide which one should get my focus next… probably either the Capital One or the Surgery Center bill. The Surgery Center doesn’t have any interest, and the Capital One does. I also need to get the balance transfer paid down/off before the promotional rate expires so that one will probably be the next one on the list. I was threatening to pay off the Perkins student loan next, since my college transferred the payments to a new company that is really ticking me off, but given the low payment amount and low interest rate, it just doesn’t make sense to do it that way. I can’t promise I won’t bump them higher on the list anyway the next time they do something dumb, though!

This is the first time since I had the surgery and added all those medical bills that I really feel like I’m making progress and there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. I’m really excited!

Debt Chart

I mentioned in my “resolution” post yesterday that I intended to start making progress on my debts. I’ve been working on gathering up all of my new debt totals, making a plan of attack, and a 2013 budget for about a month now. I figured it was time to share it all with you! Since I haven’t updated my financial totals in the past year, I decided it would be easier to start completely over with the chart. I’ll try and get to the side bar charts soon.

The debts listed here include credit cards, what is left of surgery bills from August of 2011, as well as my student loans. The Nelnet student loan is in forbearance until October, so any changes to that one before then will likely just be added interest charges. My current focus is the ER bill, that one should be gone soon… I plan on putting the majority of my Christmas overtime for getting rid of that one. After that, I *should* just go down the list in the order they are in the chart, but the car loan bugs me the most since it keeps me from owning my car free and clear, so I might tackle that one next. I honestly haven’t decided yet.

Wow, I have well and truly gotten out of the habit of updating over here. I really need to get better about that!

Tuesday I was finally able to make payment arrangements for the final service provider from my surgery last August! Getting that settled made me realize that I haven’t done a financial update over here since… what? October? Yeah… I’m still not here to do one. Hopefully soon, but I don’t have the energy/ability to go searching for account balances at the moment. In general, all the accounts have stayed the same or gone down, with the exception of one credit card that’s gone the wrong direction. Unfortunately, thanks to the medical bills, I’ve been unable to get money in savings, and I had some unexpected car repairs to make.

Since my last update, however, I’ve managed to completely pay off the anesthesiologist and the ER doctor’s bill is now down to about $320. It’s set to be paid off in the next few months. I was able to make payment arrangements with the collector that is handling the ER bill FINALLY, so that’s a huge weight off my shoulders. I still have to come up with the money to pay them obviously, but at least I no longer have to worry about when that harassing phone call is going to come. They were WAY easier to work with than the ER itself! She asked for a certain amount a month, which I couldn’t give. I said I could give $40 and increase the payment when I paid off the ER doc. Done deal. PHEW!

SO! The medical bills stand with the ER doc set to be paid off by June at the very latest (as in, if I can find absolutely zero extra money to throw at it, the minimum I’ve been paying will result in a June 1 payoff). $40/month to the ER collector, to be focusing on paying down that balance next. I’m just plugging away with my $100/month payment arrangement to the surgery center. The balance on that one is still $3211 and change so it will probably be around for awhile. The biggest goal is to have everything except the surgery center paid off or mostly paid off before my student loan comes out of forbearance in October. Meeting this goal is the only way to ensure I will be able to continue make all the necessary payments on all my debts.

I can’t say I’m not still stressed out about actually paying off these balances, and I won’t have any extra money to buy new home lighting anytime soon, but it’s a huge relief to finally have a plan for all of it. Slow and steady, I’ll keep chipping away at the balances!

First, the usual chart:

*Not sure? Think something auto paid that I wasn’t expecting and so my payment didn’t quite cover it. (Though, now that I think about it, may be Netflix’s cost change.)

In the first half of this month’s financial update comes the usual suspects… slow and steady progress on the credit cards and loans, two months worth of payments.
Then there’s the ** next to Nelnet. This is because, thanks to the medical bills I’ve accumulated, I’ve decided to put this student loan into forbearance to try and free up some money in order to make payments. It will accumulate approximately $386 in interest over the next year, which I can either pay off prior to my next payment being due in October 2012, or it will be rolled into my balance when payments resume.

Not really much to report there. Then there’s the new chart for the lovely medical bills that have all (I think. Please?) finally arrived.

((I have question marks in the cents column because I don’t have this bill in front of me or access to it on the internet. I’ll get that added in when I can.))

Ouch, right? So far I’ve made payment arrangements with the surgery center for $100/month, and everyone else gets…. not much. Cause there’s not much left. Don’t call me up and ask me to make an ach payment, cause it’s not going to happen. I’m doing everything I can to free up some cash to pay down balances. I called up Comcast to cancel my service, but let them talk me into keeping the internet at a discounted price for at least 6 months. That will save me around $50/month. I put one of my two student loans into forbearance. I am adjusting my tax withholding from my paycheck. I’m being extra diligent about shutting off lights, killing the power strip to my computer/wireless router when I’m gone/sleeping, keeping the heat off or extremely low… anything to keep the electric bill under budget and “snowflake” that money to one bill or another.

Hopefully it will be enough. Suffice it to say, I’m extremely stressed about money these days, but all I can do is take it one day at a time. It will all work out in the end, right?

As promised:

Here’s is my updated financials chart, as promised. Some good, some bad, as noted below.

Unfortunately, it’s about to look a whole lot worse. I did not add any of the pending medical bills because at this point I only have rough estimates of what those are going to be. I was told that my portion of the surgery costs is going to be $6175, less some mysterious discount but “we won’t know what that will be until we submit for payment.” Given that I just received my explanation of benefits for the ER visit, and the discount listed on that sheet was a big fat whopping ZERO, I’m going forward assuming the whole $6,175 is going to be mine. This does not include the aforementioned ER visit (and it’s expensive lab tests and ultrasound), of which my “insurance” is covering approximately $300. Nor does it include the pre or post-op visits to the surgeon. Not to mention any additional costs that might arise should I need to see my own physician to get clearance for returning to roller derby in a month or more. In any case, the number is probably going to land somewhere between $7500 and $8000 if my estimates are correct. Ouch.

I’ll be honest here. I haven’t got the slightest clue how I’m going to manage to pay for this. Trying to figure it out feels a whole lot like trying to figure out single premium immediate annuity rates. (I don’t even know what that means!) In other words, I’m kind of panicking over here. After I make the required payments on loans and credit cards, and set aside utility payments and the gas/food budget… I have $4.01 out of one paycheck and a whopping $42.91 out of the other. Not going to get very far at that rate.

My first plan of attack is to cancel the cable. I’m talking both TV and internet here. The TV portion of my Comcast bill is about as low as I can get it, and canceling just that raises the internet price, so I wouldn’t save much money without canceling both. That should free up between $75-80 a month. Honestly, Internet generally feels like a necessity in my life, but at this point I don’t see any way I can leave it on. Prior to the gallbladder attack, I was starting to consider making this change for awhile anyway… I was hoping to put that $80 towards one of my loans and pay it off faster.

I do have an iPhone though, so the ability to access Facebook and my email from that will just have to do for awhile. I considered moving to a cheaper phone without a data plan and keeping the internet, but I’m still under contract for two more months. Plus with the internet options available in my area, it seems like the savings would be a wash either way. And at least with the phone, I have my internet in my pocket and not only when I’m at home.

Beyond that, I don’t really know. Maybe I should start a chip-in… do you want to help me pay for my surgery? LOL I’ve admittedly been a bit lax in my budgeting lately, so I’m cracking down on that. Going back to “snowflaking” religiously rather than letting any extra from categories coming in under budget just fritter away somewhere. I keep an eye on the job ads, but it seems like everything that pays more than my current job doesn’t offer enough hours, and everything that is part-time/less than my current job is something that wouldn’t work as a second job. I’m at a loss. And really stressed out. I guess I’m going to pay what I can and hope it all works out. I don’t know what else to do.

*Even though the date is nearly halfway through August, balances do not necessarily include August payments. Many of those were just made today as I logged into these accounts to check balances.
** The thousand dollar jump in the total is due to the fact that I decided to finally quit pretending that I didn’t have a balance on the Amazon card, or that I was going to be paying it off so quickly that it didn’t matter anyway. With a number of purchases that could no longer be put off, as well as my changing financial situation, this card is turning out to be my “emergency fund” of sorts and is therefore still in use and not likely to be paid off anytime soon. Therefore, it earns itself a spot in the table even though the balance jumps around quite a bit.

I still haven’t updated the progress bars on the sidebar (the plug in I use for that is a mess, and no longer really usable, so I’m investigating other options), but the debts themselves are inching down this month!

The credit union visa is reflecting two payments… one for May, and the one for June. I just made the first payment on the loan, and the June payments for the two student loans haven’t cleared yet, so only one payment for May is showing for those.

I did have to put nearly $450 onto my Amazon Visa (not listed) thanks to breaking off a part of my molar and needing a crown. No need to visit http://www.wholesaleinsurance.net/… the total price was $850, and apparently the amount my dental insurance covered is the norm. Still, I don’t have $450 lying around so on credit that charge went. At least I’ll get some reward points? The only other thing this credit card is used for is auto-pay on my cell phone and Netflix. I always cash in the reward points for Amazon gift cards to buy books for my Kindle.

So that’s where things stand to start June! Here are the numbers:

That’s what I posted on my Facebook last week, anyway. As you may recall from my last financial post (maybe not, as that was 5 months ago…), I’ve been struggling with the credit card debt lately. The money’s just not stretching as far as it should these days… between a few necessary purchases, and the insanely high interest rates that credit cards carry, I just couldn’t get any traction.

I’d finally had enough, so I went to my credit union and talked to someone there about consolidating my high interest credit card debt. Long story short, I’ve now financed my credit card debt a couple of ways. The first is a credit union credit card which affords a 0% interest for six months, and will be at 7.9% for the remainder of the time. The rest of it is financed through a secured loan (secured by the title to my car) at 4.99% for the life of the loan. Since the interest rates were previously at 16.24, 20.99 and 21.99, I do think it will be much easier to make some forward progress now!

If you go back and look at my most recent financial statement, you’ll notice the total balance is about 400 or so dollars higher than it was before, thanks to a couple of purchases and the transfer fees the credit union charged. Even so, I’m incredibly optimistic, and am in the midst of reworking my budget to fit the new payments. My minimum payments have dropped about $20, and we’ve already covered how much less I’m paying in interest! I’ve considered getting a second job to help pay things down even faster, but I have to confess I don’t have much motivation to look. Between a full time job and derby, there’s just not much extra time left to fill with more work!

As far as the chart goes… I thought it would be much easier to just start over than try and fit everything in. I’ll update the sidebar… at some point. Here’s to progress!

Okay folks, this one is going to be a bit painful to write, which is part of why I’ve been putting it off for so long. And honestly, I’ve kind of been sticking my head in the sand and not really been dealing with the financial situation. A couple of days ago, though, I ran across the starting numbers… from February 2008. I decided it was time to stop hiding, total everything up and figure out how to move forward.

Since the last financial update I posted with numbers was in November of 2009, I used those numbers, and the numbers from today I pulled from all of my online account balances about 20 minutes ago. I did have to add the Amazon Chase card in to the totals because apparently in November of last year I was trying to pretend like I hadn’t opened another credit card to buy a laptop. I also removed the WaMu/Chase card that I paid off in August 09 from the chart. So anyways, without further ado, let’s rip off the bandaid.

Ouch, right? I mean, I should be able to make more than a $280 dent in my total debt in a year. (Suffice it to say, I won’t be planning any Branson vacation any time soon.) Granted, everything on this list is showing a downward trend, outside of the Discover card which went up more than a thousand dollars (!!!!) but that’s not really the big picture. In April of this year, that Capital One card was around $2700, the Discover Card was just under $5000, and that Amazon Chase card was about $500 away from being paid off. In other words, the only debts I made real progress on were my student loans– also the only ones that don’t allow me to add to them! *sigh*

So what happened? A combination of a lot of things really. First and foremost, the lack of an emergency fund. In June or July, I had finally had enough of my car troubles as my dashboard had been completely dark for months… since I didn’t have any money in savings (outside of about $30), that went on my Discover Card to the tune of about $760. The rest of that $1222 is the result of overdrawing my bank account and still needing to buy groceries and the like. When you are living paycheck to paycheck, running out of money before the week is up will set you back for a month or two. In the end, I didn’t get back on track until I finally managed to buy back some vacation time from the company. Not how I really wanted to use it, but I had to do something.

The Amazon card… that’s derby. And Weight Watchers. Both were things that I felt couldn’t wait. And roller derby can be very expensive to get started in! I needed skates, knee pads, elbow pads, wrist guards, a helmet and a mouthguard. Later I added new wheels, bearings, and crash pads to protect my hips and tailbone. Ideally, I would have liked to have had the cash to finance this venture, but I can’t say I have any real regrets about this one.

The Capital One… I have to admit, that one is just buying things I probably shouldn’t have and didn’t have the cash for.

So, that’s where I’m at. What am I going to do about it? Well, I’m not really sure. I need to revisit the budget AND START FOLLOWING it, that’s for sure. Ever since I lost all the overtime in March though, the paychecks are budgeted pretty tightly. It gets tiring to deny myself of absolutely everything all of the time. That’s pretty much what happened with those accounts on this list that are down from this time last year, but up from where they were this spring. I don’t have much money to pay on top of minimum payments, but for right now, I’m just going to try and get through Christmas and then it will be time to really refocus and see what can be done to try and bring those balances back down.

I haven’t felt like this in awhile. This panicked, what the heck am I going to do, feeling about money has been mostly gone since I started making progress on all of my debts. I sat down today to evaluate everything, though, and that feeling is back full force.

I’m looking at losing a decent portion of my paycheck going forward. The overtime has dried up at work, and in case you’re confused as to why this might be such a big problem, I’ve been pulling in 7 hours of overtime per week for the last 3 years. 7 hours isn’t a whole lot, but it adds up. I’ve got one more paycheck with 8 hours of overtime on it (opposed to the 14 from before), and then it’s just 40 hours of straight time after that.

I don’t know exactly what my paycheck is going to look like then, but I have a pretty good idea where it will be at and I’m freaking out. I’m looking at going back to barely making the minimum payments on everything instead of having several hundred extra dollars per month to pay down my accounts. It is scary and I’m thinking it might be time to look at additional part-time admin jobs, or anything really, to supplement my current income.

All I know is I am freaking out. I’ll update my account totals some other time. Just know that I’m not making much progress, but am slowly but surely still headed in the right direction.

As 2008 rolled into 2009, I sat down and thought about what I hoped to accomplish with my finances this year. “Get out of debt” just didn’t seem to do it for me, so I sat down and lined up four more specific goals to focus on. So how did I do?

1. Pay off my car — DONE! I have been driving a fully paid off vehicle since January 16, 2009!

2. Put money back in my emergency fund — I had a goal of $500. This is both DONE and NOT DONE. I met my $500 goal fairly easily, and fairly early on in the year. But then I raided it to pay on a credit card. I know, I know, this is the exact opposite of what you’re supposed to do, but the credit card issuer made me angry and I was eager to get it paid off as quickly as possible. The fund currently holds around $100.

3. Save money for Christmas in cash– Also DONE and NOT DONE. Same reason as above, I raided this account to help make the final payments on my card. However, I did end using entirely cash for Christmas. Not a present was financed, so I count this one as a success even if it wasn’t to the letter of how I originally thought it would be.

4. Pay off WaMu Credit Card– DONE, DONE, DONE! Woohoo! Of course, they closed the account on me just before I managed to pay it off entirely, dinging my credit (damage of about THIRTY points to my FICO score ), but this credit card and its debt was going to be out of my life forever anyways!

As far as 2010 goals go… more of the above! Just exchange “Capital One” for “WaMu” in Goal #4! I hope to be more successful in the area of leaving my savings alone! I just find it too tempting when I’m within striking distance of paying something off, and that amount of money is just sitting in savings. Hmm… earn 1% interest, or pay off a debt at 20% interest! I realize that’s not the point of my emergency fund, but I just can’t help it!

So yes, leaving my savings alone… paying off my Capital One credit card… and paying back my Grandma the $250 I owe her. Here’s hoping for a great financial year in 2010!