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Funks like the one I am in right now are nothing new to me. For clarification, to me, a funk is sort of like being depressed, but not as severe. Being really depressed is also something that is not new to me. Thankfully, I have those episodes a lot less often than I used to.
Funks, although they are less severe, aren’t fun either. They also have a sneaky way of affecting your mood AND your budget.
For me, funks bring about the sweet food like ice cream and candy. The thing about splurging on those? You can’t do it if you do not go near a store. While it can be downright stuffy to stay home during a funk, I know what damage I can do at the store (although…my son loves my funks because I bring all types of goodies into the house!). I did let myself go to the store during this funk and I know I shouldn’t have.
Related to food, I’m also about four times more likely to get fast food than cooking at home when I am in a funk. I normally like cooking a healthy meal for my family. I go all out and even make salads for everyone. That’s one reason I love the weekends. I can cook dinner (normally during the week, I get off work too late to prepare dinner before 7pm). With this latest funk, the $5 subs at Subway called my name and I gave in.
I also get strong urges to go shopping for stuff. Maybe a new pair of shoes or something. The oddest thing about this urge is that I am not normally into fashion. But the minute I go into a funk I must think I need to be a fashionista (not that anything is wrong with that – it’s just totally against the norm for me). Sometimes I budget shop and buy clearance items, but sometimes I don’t. Again, it’s best to stick around the house and not go anywhere. I didn’t do this one (thank goodness – I have enough shoes!).
If you don’t go anywhere, you can’t spend money!
I know that I’m not necessarily dealing with the problem directly, but for now, it’s the best thing I can do to keep our budget intact during a funk. Sometimes I feel like my brain needs to be rewired and I’ve come to accept that it can take some time to turn around years of bad spending habits.
I’m in a funk lately and I want to get out of it. This isn’t the first time it’s happened along our journey and it probably won’t be the last. I realized how bad it was this weekend when I walked right past my son when he was asking me a question. I didn’t even hear him. To be honest, I’m not sure what I was thinking about. All I know was that I “wasn’t there.”
We went out and about on Sunday to enjoy a nice spring day. The snow is melting and the waterfalls in the area are flowing full steam. While I enjoyed explaining the ways of the natural world to my son, I still wasn’t 100% there. Even when we stopped and played a game of catch in a bare field, it felt like I was having an out of body experience. Hard to describe.
Funks are not fun. Gosh I want out of this one. This is not the time to be in one with a new business venture looming. I have to get on the ball here. My husband is doing more than his share and I should be working on my part.
I’m not sure if there was a trigger for this funk, but I need to get out of it. Thanks to the internet, I found some information that might be helpful to others that are feeling a bit funky, no matter the cause.
About.com gives 10 ideas. My favorites are talking a walk, doing a random act of kindness and spending time with children. While I’ve done all three lately, they haven’t broken me out of the funk I’ve been in. But I smiled more than if I didn’t do those things.
I think the main thing now is to try to keep active, get a good night’s sleep, and try to relax a little. I also need to remember that even though we are still in debt, we have come a long way since 2005. We have a lot to be thankful for.
I am going through my emails today and catching up on some of the great links readers have sent me. I haven’t been able to personally go through all of them (one is a seminar), but I trust that these readers sent over good information. They are regular tipsters and I can’t thank them enough!
Chris sent me a link to Motley Fool’s How to Get out of Debt Seminar. It’s completely online and self-paced, so you can go through it at your convenience. They have the action steps listed, and it looks like you will go through getting ready to pay off your debt all the way to dealing with setbacks. I didn’t get a chance to go through it, but it looks like a great place to start learning how to deal with your debt. Thanks, Chris!
Beverly sent me a link to an interesting concept. There is a site out there called ShortCuts that will link more coupons to your store cards. From their store list, this is compatible with Kroger, Ralphs, Gerbes and more. I am unable to test this, because I don’t have any of those stores in my area. Are any of you using it? Thanks, Beverly for the link!
Lastly, here’s a contest I thought I would spread the word on. Intuit is giving away a free year of Quicken Online (and $350) every week until June 23. To enter, you need to add them as a friend on Facebook. I don’t have a Facebook account, but I may sign up to try to win 
Click here for more information.
There is a great bonus at ING Direct where you can earn $25 for opening up a new ING Orange Savings account with at least $250. To get that bonus, you need to use someone’s referring link.
EDIT – WOW! That was quick! There are 18 in the list, and that will probably last a few months, so I closed the comments for now. I will post again when I need more
I have been out of my links for a while, so I host ING Orange Savings referral links for others on my referral page. Every now and then I ask for more referrals on here so I can keep up the supply.
Very important – please do not send me ING links now and do not post them in the comments.
If you are interesting in having me host some ING links for you, please leave a comment below saying “I’m interested”. Once I get a good list going, I will close off this post to new comments and that will be all until next time when I need more.
As I need to refill my links, I will go through the comments on this post and will contact you when it is your turn. I will also note my progress along the way so you will know when your turn is approaching (if you want to keep track, or if you are curious when I will be asking for more again).
For the specifics here, the owners of the links receive $10 from ING when their link is used and I do not receive any of that. I do this to give back since I have been fortunate to have mine used thanks to my blog. I also cannot guarantee that your link will be used before it expires and I cannot guarantee that your link will be used correctly. I am agreeing to post your link on my referrals page and while I hope someone uses them correctly so you earn the bonus – I cannot guarantee it.
As a reminder, please do not post referral links in the comments! I will contact you when it is your turn to send me some.
Please just leave a comment saying you are interested.
Thanks!
I am so glad tomorrow is Friday. I’ve been very busy with life for the past few weeks so that’s why I haven’t been around much this week. I was okay last week, but this week I am dragging. Today, I am officially exhausted and on the verge of slap-happiness. Saturdays are my favorite days by far because I get to sleep in. That is going to feel so wonderful. Just one more day to make it through…
One very good thing about this is that I’ll have some extra money in our checkbook shortly. And that means it goes towards our debt 
There are quite a few emails in my inbox, and I will be sitting down this weekend and replying. Some of you have sent me links alerting me to interesting things (thank you!) and I’ll review them this weekend as well.
Tomorrow will be another quiet day on here, but if you have an ING account you might want to stay tuned
I ended up being pretty busy last week, and this week looks like much of the same. But there are some updates I want to give so I thought I would put them all in one post.
First of all, I’ll answer some questions:
Arduous asked
…It seems to me that $833 a month is doable though, so I am looking forward to a big old blog party in May of 2009. How much per month have you been managing lately? It seems like you’ve been paying off much more than that.
Let’s see…I’ll look at the past five months:
November 2007 = $743
December 2007 = $1,843
January 2008 = $965
February 2008 = $2,300
March 2008 = $701
It seems like every other month we have a really good debt payoff month. The months that aren’t as great are the months where our health insurance premiums are due (we pay $800 every two months). We have been averaging about $1,300/month.
Danielle asked:
Where did the $600 come from? Did you sell something?
It’s funny because I try not to give out too much specific financial information on here. I have to guard it somewhat. But, when I pay off a chunk of debt you can be pretty certain a pay day occurred not too long ago. I forecast our cash flow months in advance, so I can gauge how much money we have for everything except our debt. Extra money is sent to the credit card before it can spend it somewhere else.
In this case, I also sold some advertising on my other blog. So that is part of it as well. It is also the off-month where we don’t have to pay our health insurance premium
Now for an update on my husband’s job search.
There are still some resumes floating out there, but the jobs to apply to within his field are very slim. Maybe it’s a reflection of the economy right now. So we discussed it, and came to a decision. We are going to stay put where we are and bring to life the idea I had over a year ago. My husband will be doing the majority of the work and is not seeking employment elsewhere.
As a refresher, my idea involved about $500 as seed money to buy what we need. It’s a far cry from the $10,000 we spent towards our first business attempt (that didn’t get off the ground). We also were able to use CASH this time around, which is always a plus.
I think you know that it’s hard for me to part with a chunk of change like that. That’s why we didn’t do anything related to my idea for a year. I have had one serious case of debt tunnel vision. But a chat with someone woke us both up. We’ve already lost a year that we could have been working on it. We can’t lose any more.
In case that little birdie that woke us up is reading…thank you
How will this affect our debt reduction right now? Probably not too much. Our income should stay fairly constant at this point and all of the numbers I crunched show that we will be able to meet the $833/month payments to our debt (on average). My idea should start helping with income in six months or so.
I’m excited, because for the first time in quite a while I feel like we are looking to the future.
Over at the Consumerist, they wrote about how credit cards are raising interest rates if you happen to go over the credit limit:
Discover is the new cheerleader for penalty APRs and plans to asses rates of 31% on top of their $39 over-the-limit fee. Other creditors are rushing to get in on the action, too.
[Via Consumerist.com]
Make sure you read the comments on this one. You’ll read about credit card companies lowering credit limits to just above how much you have charged on it. If you do not catch it, and pay extra next time, the finance charges they charge you may just put you over your credit limit. Scary!
Always check your statements!
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My Debt
- Original Debt: $97,293.06
- Paid: $1,927.89
- Remaining: $95,365.17
- Emergency Fund: $1100
- Broken Down
- Line of Credit 2: $0.00
- Line of Credit 1: $0.00
- Credit Card 1: $0.00
- Credit Card 2: $245.00
- Credit Card 3: $405.00
- Credit Card 6: $1,785.00
- Credit Card 7: $2,381.17
- Consolidation Loan: $11,000.00
- Credit Card 10: $14,519.00
- Auto Loan 1: $16,093.00
- Credit Card 11: $23,873.00
- Auto Loan 2: $25,064.00
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