Debtbeater » Daily Journal

Daily Debt Journal - Day 371 - Catching up the budget

Mr. Debtbeater — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 02:43:11 +0000

So, I spent this weekend touching at least every piece of paper on my desk once. It’s amazing how much stuff can just get piled up around here when you just set stuff down with a "get to it later" mentality. I’ve nearly filled a full kitchen garbage bag full of envelopes, junk mail, and garbage that simply doesn’t need to be piled around me.

So, now that I’m caught up on paperwork, the awful-dreaded budget is next on the radar. Upon writing this up, I’ve completed a quickie-update of my spreadsheet by just updating what bills I haven’t yet paid this pay-period. The next step is to actually log into each account and update the balances so I can figure how much damage there is on my net worth.

This is going to suck…so I decided to procrastinate just a few more minutes while I get this journal entry in.

Anyway, it feels good to at least have all bills paid yet again. I don’t know how I’ve managed to not be late on anything the last six months without any kind of organization whatsoever. (Really, I checked…no late fees or anything.) It’s been a whirlwind around here (quite literally, but I’ll get to the tornados in my catch-up posts) so I’m thankful that things aren’t worse.

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Daily Debt Journal - Day 366 - Another Year

Mr. Debtbeater — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 05:15:37 +0000

Hello everyone! So it’s been exactly one year since my first daily journal. It’s actually just a couple of days past the site’s birthday. I debated for awhile on whether or not I wanted to just let the site lie dormant or let the domain expire, but it actually brings in a small residual income that more than pays for itself a few times over even after six months of no activity. So the way I figure it, is that it’s simply meant to be here for awhile and serve as my outlet for discussing personal finance with the world.

So happy birthday site! I look forward to another year of occasional updates and more frequented postings.

I plan on running a series of "catching up with the world" posts this next week to kick things off into a routine again. I’ll be describing what I’ve been up to in a nutshell while doing updates to things like the budget and progress bars. Financial issues aside, I must admit it’s been one of the most tolling, difficult years in a long while…but we’re still here!

Tonight I’ve been going through my spreadsheets and cleaning up my desk. I should have some good-news/bad-news information for next week after going through all this mess.

Until then!

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Daily Debt Journal - Day 205 - Opened My New Account

Mr. Debtbeater — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 11:10:14 +0000

So I went down to the local Wells Fargo branch today and opened my checking account to get that $50 bonus. Everything is legitimate, and I should see that extra money in 4-5 weeks.

One strange thing that they have you do to avoid the fees is to deposit $25 or $75 from your checking account every month into your savings account. The savings earns interest and serves as an overdraft protection on your checking account. That’s fine, though I’d rather not have to worry about my checking account run out of money to auto-transfer. However, this is just my emergency fund…so I don’t plan on using it much. I’ll just have to log on every so often and move the money from savings back over to checking. Could be worse. Even if I forget, it’ll take two years to run out.

So that’s that…I’ll go withdraw the money from my other account and deposit it all to the new one after I see that my last transfer gets there.

On a side note, Mrs. DB was paid a rather large check this pay-period. I think it’s her largest one yet and just over $360! As much as I hated having absolutely no weekends with her for two months, it is a nice amount to be able to apply to some of the extra spending we did on our short trip last week.

Finally time to stuff the envelopes and pay my stack of bills that have been waiting for the money.

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Daily Debt Journal - Day 204 - Bonus Time!

Mr. Debtbeater — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 12:14:25 +0000

Neat! I looks like I got my annual bonus a few weeks early this year. The direct deposit of just over $1750 just showed up in my account. This is some pretty good timing because I’d really like to pay the credit card off that I bought a plane ticket with a couple weeks ago before any kind of interest accrues. This also guarantees that I’ll make my goal of paying off $1000 in debt this month, though I’m not going to just stop there. This money needs to be put to good use as much as possible.

On a side note, I’ve also managed to tuck away $140 so far from free money and referrals for signing up with Revolution Money Exchange. (I signed up my wife too, so we got $50 in free money + $10 referral to me for signing her up. It all transferred to the one account we’re hooking up with a spare checking account I use for web project income & PayPal.) So thanks to everyone out there that signed up using my links! This guarantees that I can afford to keep this site around for another couple of years!

I’m not quite as persistent yet about daily postings…but this isn’t the only thing that’s suffering from my abnormally busy schedule the last couple weeks. :/ Hopefully things will lighten up soon enough so I can keep up with everything a little easier.

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Daily Debt Journal - Day 201 - What we messed up out of town

Mr. Debtbeater — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 13:33:50 +0000

First off, I can’t believe it’s been over 200 days since I started this blog. Wow. I feel like I don’t have a whole lot to show for it, and mostly because I still have more debt than when I started it thanks to a bunch of spending we did during the holidays. Stupid stupid stupid.

At any rate, we were out of town this weekend until late last night, and now I’m not completely caught up on my budget spreadsheet like I thought I would be. Amazing how getting home 6 hours later than you planned can really put a dent in your plans isn’t it?

On the financial side of things, we did two things completely wrong:

We didn’t have an envelope planned for our out of town trip. It’s accounted for in the budget spreadsheet, but we ended up using the debit card from our checking account instead of an envelope.
Since we didn’t use an envelope, we ended up spending WAY more than we wanted to. Instead of the allocated $60 for gas and maybe a lunch or two, we ended up spending well over $100. Probably more than twice what we budgeted. Being in a larger city with more available to you must play mind tricks on your reasoning. If we’d only had the cash we may not have let ourselves do that.

Oh well, like I said on my header’s blog description, I’m here to share good or bad. So there’s the bad. Time to get organized today so that we don’t let this happen again on our next trip.

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Daily Debt Journal - Day 180 - Love Automated Payments

Mr. Debtbeater — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 10:57:50 +0000

It’s been about 5-6 weeks since I set up a bunch of my bills on an automatic payment schedule. For the longest time, I was simply sitting down every payday and running through what bills I could pay. The system was totally prone to late payments and additional fees. I still log on every couple of days and check accounts across the board, but it’s so nice to get statements in the mail only to check the account and see that a payment is already scheduled for it. I have the budget buffer concept to thank for this. Without it I’d still be living paycheck to paycheck.

The only real work that I’ve got now as far as writing bills is to watch the medical statements (we got an awful lot of those, maybe 5-6 per month from the various doctors/clinics) and make sure they get paid. I’m horrible about getting them mixed up and thinking I paid them all when I actually missed one.

Even though it’s all automated, I’m still highlighting my numbers in blue on my budget spreadsheet every time I make a payment or see an automatic one go through. I like to see my entire column turn blue before the next pay-period or I get nervous.

I’ll be providing daily progress numbers again soon now that we’re finally getting comfortable with our envelope budgeting system. For the most part, we’ve only paid minimums and applied the rest toward our account…so not much for debt reduction the last week.

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Daily Debt Journal - Day 176 - Development vs. Writing

Mr. Debtbeater — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 13:48:15 +0000

Well, I’ve managed to knock off a few more thing from my to-do list. I’m still trying to find a balance of time where I can apply myself equally toward development on my websites and writing time keeping everyone up with our daily activity. On the bright side, I’m balancing the act a little better as time goes on.

As for spending, well, we’ve managed to go this entire pay-period without spending beyond what was in our envelopes. Granted, we had to shuffle some funds around and "borrow" from one envelope to the other, but I suppose that’s to be expected until we figure out the ideal amounts for each one.

Now that we’re comfortable with the whole envelope system plan and everyone is on board with it, I’m going to start the journal regularly again with this week’s payday-filling session tomorrow.

Also, if you haven’t already noticed, the daily journal posts are running through an entirely different RSS feed from this point forward. Sorry if that inconveniences some of you, but I really like having the separate sites for this. It’s what I wanted to begin with, but a friend convinced me that I could run them both from the same site and separate them completely so here we are!

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Daily Debt Journal - Day 165 - Catching up

Mr. Debtbeater — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 03:56:55 +0000

This was a really tough couple of weeks. Between the wife and I working lots of extra hours, having a lot to do around the house, and just keeping up with daily duties…we just haven’t had any time for any fun let alone sleep. This weekend was good though. I didn’t have any major projects to take up my time, so on and off throughout the weekend I’ve managed to get caught up to where I can actually do some writing.

I’m in the middle of writing my post discussing all the tax refund information with updates on where we are with respect to all of our debts after getting it. Something else I enjoy pointing out is that my annual increase has finally kicked in. It certainly wasn’t as much as I was hoping for, but I can’t really complain about it. The only way I could really get more would be to uproot everyone and move. We’ve decided to stick it out some more and continue to make things work.

For one thing, we’ve started using the envelopes system. I just finished stuffing them full of cash and we’re not going to use any more plastic unless something unexpected comes up. (even debit cards unless we have to) I’ve put a few of our bills on automatic withdrawal. That was kinda neat to watch happen a few times with the money already in there.

I drained my surplus of posts while I was away, so I’ve been building up some more this weekend. I don’t like being without at least a week’s worth.

I’m going to hold off on putting a "Today’s Progress" summary up, because I’m going to update the budget page tonight and we’ll start with a clean slate tomorrow evening now that I’ve got all my envelopes filled with cash.

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Daily Debt Journal - Day 152

Mr. Debtbeater — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 05:53:30 +0000

As I was hoping to get by two days in a row without spending any money, I realized that my car’s gas light was already on for two days in a row. Guess it’s time to bite the bullet and just fill the car. That’s one of the advantages to having the same car for over 10 years, I really know how far I can push the limit on it when it comes to procrastinating the fill-up.

Perhaps this reveals a little habit of mine though…living paycheck to paycheck really lines up with living gas tank to gas tank. The procrastination of every little thing that takes money away from me to the point where I’m almost late…or stranded.

Today’s Progress:

Earned - $0
Spent - $35.46 (gas)
Debt Reduced - $0

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Daily Debt Journal - Day 151 - Heck yeah, no spending!

Mr. Debtbeater — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 05:21:03 +0000

After two days of spending what seems like WAY too much money, we’ve finally gone a day without spending anything. Unfortunately, the biggest reason we aren’t spending any money is because we simply don’t have any! That’s right, living paycheck to paycheck is THE LIFE FOR ME! (that’s sarcasm if you couldn’t tell)

The wife is really getting onto me about wrapping up the taxes, which I’m doing tonight. Getting that refund to us will allow us to seriously apply the cash-envelope system and not feel so strained with the timing of our bills vs. our paychecks once we get our budget buffer in place and our starter emergency fund put together.

Here’s to a late night of taxes!

Today’s Progress:

Earned - $0
Spent - $0
Debt Reduced - $0

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