Blogging Away Debt

This weeks ups and downs in our little world:

The good:

We were interviewed for a radio segment on Marketplace for NPR. Depending on how ridiculous we sound, we’ll post a link to the podcast for y’all. Overall a really fun experience talking to an expert about our financial situation and getting some third party advice on our debt payoff strategy.

I moved out of my studio space: I’d been renting a shop/ studio for over a year, which had its own ups and downs. While it would’ve been possible for me to work from home in the last two rental houses, I felt it would have been inconsiderate to the neighbors (because of the noise and clutter) disrespectful of our agreements with our landlords, and could have hurt my business because both neighborhoods were kind of sketchy- ghetto (but cheap).
Luckily, I was able to move over the course of the week, which gave me time to clean and organize while I went. I did 90% of the moving on my own, which saved me the expense of hiring a crew. It definitely wasn’t easy and I got pretty beat up and exhausted, but at the end of the week I could see what I’d accomplished. I love that feeling! I’m looking forward to the money saving benefits of running my business from home! I wont have to pay rent (about 450 a month) I’ll be saving in gas (300 a month) and hopefully Ill be able to cook, clean, and get household chores done throughout the week. Hopefully this working from home gig will also help us spend less on groceries and eating out! YAYYYY!

We may be borrowing some mini donkeys: One of my clients offered to let us borrow them for two weeks to help accelerate clearing the land. I’ll keep y’all posted on if we get them or not. I am SO excited! MINI DONKEYS!!!

Cooking day with my sister: we spent half a day cooking some meals for our families and one of her friends that just had a baby. My sister is a master at cooking yummy food on the cheap, and I was once a manager in a commercial kitchen (for a summer in college) so together we can get a lot of goodness done in a little bit of time. This time we just made Thai coconut chicken curry and meatballs with sauce, which were both were uber inexpensive and delish. It’s a good way for me to spend quality/ fun time with my sister and get stuff done at the same time. Lots of giggling and making fun of eachother. 🙂

Getting the rental cottage cleaned and occupied: we were both pretty nervous about our previous renter moving out and the new renters actually showing up and moving in. It turned out to be pretty stressful, but it goes in the good category because we cleaned and prepped the space together, without hiring a crew, and the new renters said the place looked great! I’m proud of us for getting all the cleaning done pretty efficiently and working together. I’m also happy the new renters are here, moved in, and paid. What’s that saying? It ain’t over until the fat lady sings? I think we both kept thinking they were going to back out, but it’s gone we’ll so far!

Free baseball game: A fun date on the cheap! Even parking was free! And the game was awesome!

The not so great:

Adjusting to a new budget: I feel like it’s just one more thing I’m going to worry about, and it’s going to take some more adjustment on my part to get used to the new way of spending money. Or not spending money. Bah humbug! 😉

Waiting for the previous renter to move out: This was really, really frustrating. We told him we had renters moving in on the first, and we would need to get in there and clean as soon as possible, and he said he would be out by Sunday the 28th. At 11pm on the 31rst and he was still over there “cleaning” and moving, leaving us to hustle booty to get it cleaned and ready for the renters who were moving in later that day. I was already pretty peeved at him for leaving the house so messy when we would have showings (it was so gross we were not sure we were going to be able to rent it), but this last minute move out was icing on my angry cake. It was really, really frustrating having to clean up after a grown man. I know he knows better than to leave the house in that condition for showing and when he moved out, but he did it anyway. Not cool.

Fighting about renovations: I really would like to at least try to make some updates to our home. It hasn’t been updated or really even cared for since it was built in the early 90s, and the wear and tear from it being a rental for so long really shows. I’m starting to feel like we shouldn’t have bought this house (or any house) if we knew we wouldn’t have the funds to make it a nice home. Before we bought this house, we should have agreed on a time frame for renovations and made sure our goals were clear. I think I’m just generally frustrated that we don’t share the same goals for making the house comfortable and homey. When we talk about it, Adam brings up good points about needing to save for a bigger emergency fund, retirement, paying down our debt and then paying off our mortgage early. I think he’s probably right, I just wish we could compromise a little 🙂

Work flow: With the move this week, it was hard for me to schedule appointments and meet with clients. I still have some rearranging to do at home before I feel comfortable inviting customers over for sales and consultations, and I need to get it done fast! This was a week with no sales, and that’s frustrating. I do have some great projects coming up, but I’m a little apprehensive about how I’m going to run the business from home. I’m hoping it will be a huge advantage to us and not an extra stressor.

Yay for the weekend! I’m ready to kick back a little and chill 🙂 Thanks for following us as we are on this crazy journey. 🙂

The Votes Are In

by Adam Dawson

We have been so encouraged by all the great ideas everyone has been leaving in the comments on the last several posts! We don’t get around to responding to everyone, but we probably do discuss every single idea and bit of advice we’ve gotten.

And so, we have some good news to share…Drumroll, please…….

We have an August Spending Plan! We are going to try several of the ideas you gave us with this month’s plan:

Emergency Fund. We are going to start saving $300 a month to increase our emergency fund. After the discussion about having greater rental reserves and saving for home maintenance, our puny emergency fund that we had while we were renting began to feel inadequate.
Budget Categories. Instead of having envelopes for 8-10 categories like in the past, we are going to reduce the categories to just a few necessary ones. All bills will be paid from our bank account directly. We will still use our debit cards for gas. We will set aside specific amounts for car repairs, groceries each week, pet food, and hair care. Everything else will be lumped into one big category that we will call Spending Money. We will each get $75 per week for all our personal needs: clothes, cosmetics, restaurants, coffee, household supplies, entertainment, etc. The $75 sounds like a lot but when you start some of these items, I’m sure it will go fast! I have to get tires on my car this month so I can pass state inspection, so that reduces the amount of spending money we have available.
Cash. Our spending money will be withdrawn from the bank each week in cash. No more debit cards for day to day purchases. When it’s gone, it’s gone!
Hair Care. This is Emily speaking: I’ve known for a while that I couldn’t keep spending that huge (unmentionable) chunk of money on my hair, so I was ready to look for other options. (I only went to such a fancy salon in the first place because they offered a really great Groupon deal for a cut and deep conditioning treatment.) Although I liked the suggestion to try Groupons for hair services, visiting a different salon every time, I am still a bit hesitant to try this because I’m afraid I’ll get hooked on another fancy salon. So at the recommendation of a few commenters, I tried going to The Aveda Institute. I have a few other options in mind, but I thought I’d start with this one, as it was something I’d been wanting to try for a while. I’ll give a full review of the experience once I’ve tried a few other options, and we can compare the results at that time. For now, I’ll just say that it was so-so. It took more than half a day to complete, they had to redo the cut AND the color, and it’s still wrong, but not totally awful. I wanted just a refresh of the color and the roots, and I ended up with a totally different style of (brown) hair. On the upside, I got a free massage, free tea (YAY!) and it was less than half of what I’d been paying. It felt great to spend so much less than I was spending, but I’m undecided about the experience. On to the next suggestion! Back to Adam: We are going to budget $100 per month for Emily’s salon visit and we agreed that if she wants to go once a month, she can find a $100 salon, or if she wants to spend $200, she can go every other month. I wish it was less money, but I learned a lot from the discussion here about what it’s really like trying to get a woman’s hair taken care of.
Online Tools. We used to use Mint.com. It was easy when our budget was cash-based, but when we got away from using cash, then tracking all the debit card transactions in Mint became overwhelming. Since we’ll mostly be using cash, I may try to dust off mint.com and see if we can start tracking again.

It feels good to have a plan. I feel confident that we will have enough money to make it through the month, and that alone is a burden lifted. However, I know that $75 per week will be a significant pinch to how we’ve been living. I think we are both sort of dreading it. If we work together, we have $150 a week and should be able to do just about anything we want. If we act independently, it may be a lot harder. For anything that costs more than $75 and we have to save up for, we’ll have a much harder time.

So, thank you to everyone who shared their experiences and ideas with us! Hopefully August will be the month that we start gaining control over our finances!

Blogging Away Debt Blogging Away Debt follows real people on their journey to debt freedom — with tips on the debt snowball, budgeting, cutting expenses, and staying motivated.

Our week in review

The Votes Are In