When my debt is reduced to only my mortgage payment, what will I do?!?

If you had asked me, when I first started this journey, what I would do when my debts were paid, I would have said, “I want to remodel my 50 year old kitchen” or “I want to restucco my home!”

The fantasy has changed.

My fantasy now consists of a paid off mortgage and growing mutual funds.

I can’t tell you how strange it was to sit down to deliberate over the next step. Obviously we are going to save a larger emergency fund and aggressively pay our second mortgage but my dreams of ‘big shiny things’ are fewer and farther between. OK, I’ll just spit it out…

I’m an addict.

I’m addicted to the good feeling I get when I see zero balances.

Have you thought about your life after debt? What are your plans (other than investments and mortgage payoffs)?

First things first, we are still credit card debt free. May was an awesome month and I had a renewed zest for stockpiling money away in our savings account. That’s not to say we didn’t purchase a bigger ticket item, because we did. No, it’s not that LCD TV

Instead of purely talking about our finances, I thought I would briefly talk about two different topics on my mind this month. I suppose you could call them “mini-blogs.”

Big Ticket Item Purchase
Near the beginning of our debt reduction journey, we decided to stop using the freezer that came with our home when we purchased it. We were using way too much electricity and I had a hunch the very old freezer was drawing way too much power. As soon as it was unplugged, our electricity bill went down.

We’ve been without a freezer ever since. Sure, we had the one with our fridge but you can’t fit too much in it. I have been patiently watching the sales and finally…there was a 7.0 cu ft freezer for sale for $170. My price point was met and we now have a freezer. Yay!

I’m anxiously waiting to stock it with fruits and vegetables this summer. But something I didn’t necessarily realize is how much money we can save on dining. Our schedules have been hectic lately and we find ourselves grabbing fast food at least once a week. I can stock the freezer with some frozen foods that we can pull out and pop in the oven or microwave in a pinch. So far it has been working out great. We don’t want to eat those foods too often for health reasons (sodium content being a biggie), but fast food often has a lot of salt as well.

It’s never easy for me to spend that much money on a single item, but I’m very happy with the purchase. I see it paying for itself in less than 6 months.

Coupons
I’ve never been that big into coupons. The coupons I would see in the papers were often for expensive brand name items that we don’t buy. I live in an area where the local grocery stores do not offer double coupons. It was usually cheaper to go with the generic brands.

I started reading Money Saving Mom and started watching how others have made the coupons work for them. I gave it a shot and was surprised at how many coupons you can get online (including those you can find on Facebook (I’ve found some great ones from there). During the month of May, I’ve probably saved at least $50.

It’s addictive, though. The first time I did it I was armed with a stack of coupons. I could feel the adrenaline rush through me as the grocery bill got lower and lower as the cashier processed the coupons. I found myself wanting to find more and more coupons and go back out to the store.

And that is where it can be dangerous. It’s great to save a lot of money, but you don’t want to spend too much and have food go bad or have a cabinet full of food you probably won’t eat. I don’t even want to start thinking back to how many products I have purchased because they were a great deal. Many of them ended up at the last garage sale I had and someone else got an even better deal then I did! LOL.

I am still very much a coupon newbie and I am figuring out the happy balance with my couponing. I need to do it responsibly and figure out how to take less time doing it. I was spending way too much time figuring out what coupons I should print. Anyone have any couponing tips to share?

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That is all for this month. I have had a very exhausting week and I have had very little rest. I am ready for some serious rest and relaxation this weekend and my bed is calling my name right now.

Have a great weekend everyone!

This month has been a lot better than last month even though there was a pinch from my medical bills. The total damage after insurance came to $560. I can’t really complain when the total bill for my mammogram, ultrasound and biopsy came to almost $2,000.

Back when we had $37,000 in credit card debt, those medical bills would have set me off the deep end. There would have been plenty of tears and moments of desperation. I can’t say how thankful I am that we managed to pull ourselves together, pay our credit cards off and stash some money in an emergency fund. It seemed like a long three years at the time, but in hindsight it doesn’t seem like it was that long at all. If you are having a hard time with keeping motivated to pay off debt, just keep at it. Trust me. It’s been worth it.

That leads me to mention that we are still credit card debt free. We are spending less than we earn and we still have money in the bank. We aren’t as far with contributing to our savings or paying towards our other debt balances as I had hoped, thanks to some financial set backs. None of them forced us back into credit card debt so I cannot complain. What we will do is keep chugging along.

In the last update, I mentioned that I had to sit down and do our taxes. Well, they are almost done. I usually go through them once and put in a few estimates if I can’t readily locate some paperwork. Then I go back in and finalize it. I’m at that point where I have to dig for paperwork. I am glad to report that we will be getting a tax refund just shy of $1,000. I thought for sure we didn’t pay enough in self-employment taxes but I guess we paid more than enough! Some new deductions we were able to take this year really helped and were a pleasant surprise.

What should we do with the windfall? My first thought (as always) is to get a nice LCD TV. I first wrote a post about how much I wanted one back in July of 2006 (that’s the really neat thing about blogging – you can look up dates like that ). I am still mesmerized by them all of the time in the stores and I’ve watched the prices drop year after year. But we still haven’t bought one. Am I finally going to get one? No. As much as I still want one, I can’t do it. Our tax return is going to our savings account.

I will conclude this update with saying that April 24th will be a special day in our household – it marks exactly a year since our credit card debt was paid off. I can’t believe it has been almost a year. My, my, my, how the time does fly!

Till next time…take care everyone!

It’s sort of my unwritten rule that I do not discuss people close to me on here unless I can keep it very general or if they say it’s okay. So you’ll have to pardon me when I say there was someone close to me with a health issue but do not give any more details. It’s tough when you know someone having troubles. I am a worry wart – I didn’t handle it well. A little bit later I found myself with my own health issue. Since that issue is about me, it’s fair game to blog about so I will take this update as my chance to do so.

Before you read any further, what I am about to write is not necessarily finance-related although the financial aspect of it will probably be discussed in a future update. It also may be too much information for some of you and it’s definitely not what you would expect to read on a debt blog. It’s still very fresh on my mind and it’s been a part of my “Life After Credit Card Debt.” Rather than skip yet another update, I decided to write about it.

Deep breath…here we go…

I still remember the exact moment I felt it. It was a small, hard lump a little bigger than a pea. I finished up my shower and as soon as I saw my husband I said, “I found a lump in my breast.” The next morning I told my doctor what I had found and she wanted to see me at my earliest convenience. I made an appointment and tried not to think about it too much. When it was time for her to see me, she confirmed that she felt the lump in my left breast and she said the next step would be to get a mammogram. I’m in my early 30s, I never thought I would be having a mammogram so soon.

My husband went with me to my mammogram appointment. He asked the technician if he could go in the mammogram room with me (what a sweetie) but the technician said he couldn’t because of the radiation. The technician left me alone in the mammogram room to change and I slipped on the hospital gown. There was a mirror on the wall and I found myself gazing into it, feeling like all of this was a dream. I heard a knock and the technician came back in. As my breasts took turns being compressed in the mammogram machine I knew it wasn’t a dream. When it was over, the technician left the room to develop the film. I decided to stand instead of sit in the pink recliner. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the x-rays start to appear on the technician’s computer monitor behind the glass. I pressed my face as close to the glass as I could. There was my left breast. I didn’t see the lump I felt, but I saw some white in the area where the lump was. I knew enough from researching mammogram pictures on the internet that white isn’t necessarily a bad thing. My right breast pictures started to appear. Clear as day, there was a mass. I was completely surprised – my left breast had a palpable lump, not my right!

The technician came back and said that the radiologist didn’t need any more pictures and that I could get dressed and leave. I wouldn’t receive my results for a few days. I joined my husband in the waiting room and we went home. Life went on as I anxiously waited for the results. I jumped every time the phone rang. Almost a week later the results came back. It wasn’t the worst news, but it wasn’t the best news either. The results were inconclusive – I needed to have a follow-up ultrasound. The appointment was made for that and again I had to wait. Of course, I hit the internet again but this time I filled my brain with ultrasound pictures.

The day of the exam, my husband had to work so he couldn’t be there with me. The technician left the ultrasound room while I slipped on the hospital gown. This time I didn’t think I was in a dream. It was all very real and part of me wished I was back to thinking it was a dream – if only for a little bit. The technician came back and instructed me to lay on the bed. She squirted the cold gel on my body and the ultrasound began. She located the mass in the right breast first. It was uncomfortable, but I managed to contort my neck enough to allow me to view the monitor. There was definitely a mass, but the inside of it was black. Fluid shows up as black on an ultrasound so I took that as a good sign that maybe the mass was just a cyst. Whew. She moved the ultrasound wand to the other breast. She started hitting buttons on the ultrasound console to mark something on the screen. Mark what? I couldn’t tell heads from tails with what I could see on the screen.

When she was done I asked if I would receive results that day and she slightly chuckled that it would take a few days for the radiologist to review and for me to receive the results. She left the room to talk to the radiologist to make sure he or she didn’t need any more pictures. I sat up from the bed and reviewed the ultrasound pictures still on the screen. I didn’t like what I saw (or rather couldn’t see) with the left breast lump. I forced myself to lay back down and stare at the ceiling tiles. I’m not a radiologist. I have no clue what the ultrasound pictures mean and I had to stop looking at them.

The technician’s knock broke my tile-counting concentration. She walked in and she wasn’t alone. The man with her was dressed in business casual attire and not wearing scrubs. My heart dropped even before he introduced himself as the radiologist. I knew it wasn’t a good sign when she brought him back with her. He started off by talking about the mass in my right breast. It was nothing to worry about and blah, blah, blah. Seriously, I don’t know what all he said. You’d think that I would have felt some relief at that news but I didn’t. He was there for a reason and it wasn’t to tell me everything was okay. Finally he started talking about the lump in my left breast. Again, I don’t remember everything that he said but he did mention that he didn’t think the lump was cancer. That was the first time anyone uttered the “C” word to me. I tried my hardest to keep my face emotionless but a single tear managed to slip out and travel down my right cheek.

I had a few options. I could come in for follow-up ultrasounds at six months and a year to see if there are any changes with the lump or I could have a biopsy right then and there. Biopsies are more invasive than an ultrasound but you will know for sure if a lump is cancerous or benign without waiting months. I bet I don’t have to say which option I chose.

The radiologist performed a fine needle aspiration biopsy. He numbed my breast with a shot of lidocaine – the same anesthetic that dentists use to numb your gums. With the technician showing the way with the ultrasound machine, the radiologist pierced my skin and navigated the needle to the lump. The needle draws out either fluid or pieces of the lump depending on what the lump is made out of. I had wanted to watch the procedure itself to see what ended up in the needle barrel but given my awkward position and the needle angle I couldn’t see it. I did the next best thing and watched the procedure on the monitor. After three aspirations with the needle the procedure was finished. I asked how long the results would take and they told me 2-3 days.

I went home and the waiting period began. I found an article from the New York Times that said that the anxiety of waiting for biopsy results appears to affect stress hormone levels just as much as finding out you have cancer does. I believe it. The stress broke me down.

Two days passed. Three days passed. Four, then five days passed. I received a telephone call – the person close to me was going to be just fine. A large portion of the weight on my shoulders was lifted as I soaked in the good news. The last thing to know about was the result of my biopsy. Six days passed. Finally, a week after my biopsy I heard the results: benign. That single word was what I wanted to hear. I started balling. It wasn’t because I was overjoyed and it definitely wasn’t because I was sad. I had been under so much stress the past few months and kept most of it in. I felt it was finally time to cry buckets and I did. I let it all out.

So now we are at the present day. It’s been only a few days since hearing the benign word. I think it’s a funny looking word, but it’s oh so beautiful. This weekend I will be digging back into our finances again since they have been put on the back burner. It’s also time to start our taxes to see where we stand with those this year. The next update will be lighter fare (I certainly hope!) and related to finances.

Till next time…

I am very thankful we are still credit card debt free. It’s not easy, especially around this time of year with all of the specials. I was very tempted to try to get a deal on an LCD TV but I told myself no. We are not where we’d like to be financially quite yet. Plus, there are more important things to spend money on right now (like visiting with family). Back when we were paying off credit card debt it was all about determining your priorities. The same thing goes once you pay off credit card debt.

I sometimes have my priorities straight. At other times they are way out of line, especially when it comes to specials. There is something about finding a great deal that gets my blood flowing. With visiting family, it made it pretty easy to not wake up early and join in on the shopping. But deep down I wanted to get that rush. I’m trying something different this year and will try reading a few Black Friday articles once I return home. Perhaps I can get a rush from reading about the awesome deals others have received (if you have a story – feel free to share!).

As for an update on our finances, they are doing well. They are not as great as I’d like them to be, but they could be better. Heh, they could always be better We decided to do some much needed work around our home that we have been putting off for some time. Some of it we did ourselves and some of it we outsourced. We finally hired someone to cut down a tree in our yard that has been in poor health since we purchased our home. The years went by and I knew we were on borrowed time this summer because a large part of the crown didn’t even get leaves on it. After they cut it down you could see all of the rot in the trunk. My guess is that it would have come down this winter after a heavy snow.

Things went well with deteriming our priority in regards to our tree. I cannot say the same for our car. In an effort to save some money we took off the full coverage insurance we had. Our car is worth less than $4K at this point so we felt that it was time to remove it. I probably don’t even have to say what happened next – it was in a collision that was not our fault. Thankfully there were no injuries and the damage was cosmetic but our car is worth even less now. I did kick myself for a little while for taking off the full coverage. We probably will think twice before removing the full coverage again from a vehicle. We still have a lot to learn

That is all the time I have for this update. I hope all of you had a fantastic Thanksgiving!

This month was supposed to be a better month. It was a better month for our discretionary spending since we started a cash based system. It’s our necessary spending for health (supplements, specific healthier foods, etc.) that really hurt. I don’t regret spending the money, but it is really hurting our bottom line.

There’s also the wonderful surprise we received on September 2 from our health insurance company. They decided to raise our rates 28%. Oh, and the first payment with the new rate was due today. That’s an extra $115/month we have to now pay – and we didn’t even get a 30 day notice. If we didn’t need their health insurance, I would have cancelled it right then and there. I understand that rates sometimes need to be increased. We’ve dealt with many companies that have raised rates recently. But giving less than a 30 day’s notice is dirty in my book. We are fortunate – we had a little bit of wiggle room to be able to cover it this month. I know that there are many families that didn’t.

With everything going on, I am still very grateful. We are still credit card debt free and we are still holding our head above water. We’ll keep plugging away with increasing our emergency savings and paying off the rest of our debt, even if sometimes it feels like we are spinning our wheels. Eventually we’ll get some traction

Things in our financial arena could be better right now. I was a little more relaxed with tracking our finances (ok, I was lazy and didn’t keep a watchful eye on everything) and we spent more money than we probably should. We still do not have credit card debt, but we are not contributing to our savings account or paying off debt like I had hoped for this month.

This time, I’m not saying, “Hopefully next month things will be better.”

No, this time things will be better. How? We are ditching our debit card and the one credit card we use for cash back and pay off in full multiple times a month. We are going back to good ‘ole cash.

If you followed my story, I’ve mentioned many times that I do not like using cash. In fact, I’m still not crazy about it. But now that our credit card debt has been paid off, I have lost some motivation. Sure, we have other debt to pay off (student loans and mortgage), but I do not have the same passion to pay that off as I did with the credit card debt.

We need a challenge.

I thought about it for a while, and using only cash seemed to be a perfect fit. We’ll have a certain amount to use every week and once the cash is gone – there is no more spending. The cash will need to cover everything that is not normally paid via automatic payment or check. I have a feeling that it will lead us to do some creative things to make it through the end of the week at times. It should help spur our creativity and get our frugal juices flowing again. They were still there, just a little stale. Time to spice things up!

I’m pretty excited about the change in our financial routine. Perhaps it was time to try something a little different. I’ve always said that everyone should make their own recipe for financial success by taking tidbits from here and there. I guess I never thought about modifying that recipe every now and then just to keep things fresh. Perhaps this is just what we need right now in this stage of our lives

With that, I will conclude by saying that September will be a great month and I have to congratulate Beks – she just paid off her credit card debt. Woohoo!

Before I talk about our finances for July, I’d like take the spotlight for a moment to discuss something very personal.

I have been suffering from anxiety for quite a few years now, although I didn’t recognize it until recently.

Many people suffer from anxiety. I didn’t recognize it, though, for what it really was. I always thought that it was our financial situation that caused me to have the constant worry. We were in debt – why wouldn’t I be excessively worried, right?

Once our credit card debt was paid off things didn’t get better. They actually got worse (probably because not too long after it was paid off I stopped blogging regularly – which I think was therapeutic in a way). I finally realized that it wasn’t normal.

I’m glad to report that with my doctor’s help, I am feeling a lot better. I wanted to share this with all of you now in case it may help someone else out there. I can only imagine how different things would have been during our debt reduction journey if I realized what was going on. While it’s normal to have some worry, mine was excessive.

For more reading about anxiety, here is a link to MedlinePlus.

Now on to our July finances. First things first – we still do not have credit card debt! Yay! July was an okay month. We did visit with family this month so there were extra expenses and unfortunately some unpaid time off. That hurt a little, but it’s always worth every penny to visit with family. I almost added to our savings account this month, but we had yet another doctor bill trickle in. We should be all set with doctor bills for a while, unless there is something else our doctors forgot to bill us for.

August should be a good month. There are no trips and no more doctor bills (hopefully!). It looks like we’ll finally be able to put a nice deposit into our savings account.

Here’s to a great August! It’s hard to believe summer is going by so quickly!!

One of the big things we did after paying off our debt was to get all of us into a good doctor. We got some of the bills last month, but we got the biggie bill this month. Beks just talked about health and finances. They are definitely related when you see the bill! I had mentally prepared myself for the moment I opened the envelope, but nothing really prepares you to see a bill approaching $1,000.

Thank goodness we do have the money and we get a 10% discount if we pay within 30 days. I’m also very glad we have been shelling out the money for an individual health insurance plan. That bill would have made me faint without it (it covered 70%).

It’s money well spent, though. We know that there is nothing seriously wrong with my husband (he had an expensive test done), our son is feeling better and I’m slowly starting to feel like myself again after taking supplements for vitamin deficiencies. While we were in debt reduction mode, we put a lot of that off. We shouldn’t have. I see now that we may have been too aggressive with paying off our debt by cutting spending that we shouldn’t have cut. But, you live and learn.

I discussed last month that our car was playing with us with the check engine light. Well, it wasn’t playing and I ended up jinxing myself. After shelling out almost $300 for what the mechanic thought was the problem – it still isn’t fixed. With all of the computers in cars, you’d think that if something was faulty the computer could tell you exactly where the problem lies. Instead, our car just notes that it is a general problem that could be a number of things. I have no idea how much this will cost to finally fix, since it’s a matter of fixing one thing and if it doesn’t correct the problem you fix the next thing on the list.

So money is flowing out freely right now. It’s frustrating. On the bright side, we haven’t had to put anything on our credit cards. So we still are credit card debt-free. Too many more months of financial hemorrhaging and that may not be the case.

I guess even though we achieved our goal of paying off our credit card debt, there will still be the bumps in the road that I talked about a few years ago. We’ll get through this rough patch and then be on our way again with increasing our financial health.

The road isn’t easy, but it will get easier. That’s what I’ve been saying to myself this month. Hopefully things will improve in July.

First things first – are we still credit card debt free? Yes! In the back of my mind, I kept wondering if something would happen out of the blue and set us back again. I was anxiously waiting for the end of the month to see if anything happened. A few days ago we did have a little scare when the check engine light came on in our car. We reset the light and so far it hasn’t come back on again so we hope it was a general misfire on our car’s part (it has done that in the past). I hope I didn’t jinx ourselves right there. We’ll see.

With things going so well, you’d think that we were able to replenish our savings account since we used some of it to pay off the last of our credit card debt. Well, we haven’t yet. We spent money on some other things.

The most important one was our health. Sure, we went to the doctor’s when we were sick while we were paying off debt, but it was a very reactionary approach to overall health. We decided that we needed to be proactive with our health and work to make ourselves as healthy as possible. A big part of that was finding a doctor that will help us with that. I wasn’t quite prepared for the sticker shock when it came to making sure our bodies have the correct fuel it needs to function properly.

For example, we found out that our son was deficient in a few vitamins and minerals. The total monthly cost for his supplements is $55/month. That will ease up once we revise our diets yet again (we did it once already to reduce sodium). I’ve been busy reading up on vitamins and minerals and trying to come up with a better menu for all of us since I suffer from vitamin deficiency as well. It’s funny, we thought we were eating healthier but in the process we were stripping ourselves of some very important nutrients.

It’s tough to spend money like we have this month, but we are taking care of the biggest assets we have…ourselves.

Another thing we did was spend money on our son’s extracurricular activities. We bought the bare minimum before, but we spent some more money there to get him better equipped. We also bought some equipment so mom and dad could participate as well to help him practice. It has been some very nice family time together.

Lastly, here is a big shocker. In a very weird turn of events, I was approached with a job offer. When one door closes, another one opens (life is funny that way). After some lengthy discussions, we decided that I would accept the job offer. Since I have been working at home for the past few years, I needed a new wardrobe since I would be working outside of the home in a professional position. I also decided to get a professional haircut to spruce myself up a bit.

Working at home has been a big money saver for us and I enjoyed the job that I had. It was a tough decision. In the end, we decided that the contacts I would make in regards to our business tipped the scales to the new position. There is a lot of value in that and I plan to fully capitalize on it. I’ve become pretty detached to the outside world since I started working at home and it was time to get back out there and network and make some friends.

That brings me to a business update. Things are still going well although sales have not increased this month. It’s been hectic around here with my new position and my husband is at the same job. We’re still getting used to yet another new schedule. Add our son’s events into the mix and it’s often go-go-go for us. It takes a while for the waves to calm down after rocking the boat. May has been a crazy month and we didn’t add any new products to our business or do any promotion.

We may decide to put some money into our savings this weekend. We have a healthy buffer in our checking account right now since we often ran things so close while in debt reduction mode. We could use that to put a little bit more into our savings. I have been updating my NetWorth IQ profile so if we end up using some of our buffer for our savings it will show up there in May’s update.

I’m not sure what next month will bring. We will likely be bringing in more money and we won’t be spending as much money so it should be a great month for us. Hopefully we will be able to contribute a large amount to our savings account. Then again, I never thought I would be working another job right now so it just goes to show how life is unpredictable. I guess we’ll see what June brings.

Hope all of you are doing well!

Since this is my last regular post, I have a few “administrative” things to mention…

For those who have their $25 ING Savings Referral links posted, please continue to send an email when they get used. I am still monitoring and taking care of the list until it is finished. If you are thinking of opening a savings account, the deal at ING is still a good one. You get a $25 bonus when you open an account with $250. You will also help a reader since they get $10. Please see the ING Savings Account Referral page for self-serve links.

I can still be reached by using the contact form. All you need to do is mention that the email is for me and it will be forwarded to me. I’ve received quite a few emails the past few years and if any of you would like to give an update on how you are doing, I’d still love to hear them! Or if you are looking to vent, I am here for that too

The “how we did it” recap post is still in progress. I will post when it is finished.

I will be tracking my Net Worth using my NetWorthIQ profile. The information will be condensed since I won’t be breaking down every detail, but you can see how we are doing overall. Here is the link to my profile. If you are a member over there, you can also leave comments and send messages. It’s a pretty neat online program.

This is not a goodbye since I will still be blogging on here – it just won’t be as often. But I will be around in the comments supporting Beks as she works to pay off her debt and I’ll be stopping by some of your blogs as well since I am way behind with my blog reading.

With that, I’ll see you with the next update