Archive for the ‘relapses’ Category
Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 |
I’m constantly baffled by people that are the front man for credit card purchases.
You know the types… the people that have a credit card that fronts the purchase for someone without a credit card and will be reimbursed with cash?
For instance, I know someone (Person A) that bought plane tickets for someone (Person B) because they didn’t have a credit card. The Person B gave them the cash immediately, but instead of paying the credit card down the Person A will spend it elsewhere and continue paying on the payments.
It’s literally throwing money away. Lets say, the plane tickets cost $400. With interest and the continuouse minimum payments building up on the credit card, Person A might as well pay Person B $150 so they can front the $400 plane ticket purchase the non credit card user.
And that’s a low estimate since credit card interest rates are higher than normal. And considering that it could take YEARS to pay down a credit card on minimal payments, they could end up paying double.
It doesn’t add up nor make sense. You’d be better telling the person NO or telling them you don’t have a credit card if all you’re going to do is burying yourself deeper and DEEPER in debt.
Posted in Informational, purchases, relapses | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 |
Yup.
This is one of those articles that should have no place in a financial freedom blog.
Let’s be honest. Who am I kdding?
There’s a reason I haven’t been one of those success stories I constantly read about. You know the one, (The typical Dave Ramsey caller just sending in their last mortgage payment and get to yell “I’M DEBT FREE!!!” with some idiot named Jimbo in the background). I Loathe to become “Jimbo”.
Or do I?
How is it I can hear the background so clearly in their household? And how did they pay off $120K in mortgage debt in five years while only bringing home $60K/year between them? I started thinking about the difference between me and them and quickly realized that the reason that their background is so quiet is because of the absense of kids.
Now, I’m probably an atypical parent that makes jokes about kids being worrisome or being around. Truth is, I’d be lost without them. I have a great nuclear family and couldn’t /wouldn’t ask for anything more out of what the wifey and I have made. Having said that, we currently have 4.7 to be exact (one due in July) so there has to be an end to this madness somewhere right?
RIGHT! On April 10th, 2009. I sat down on the Dr. Teitjan’s slab in Lee’s Summit, MO and did the unthinkable/most femenizing thing a man could do…
I GOT SNIPPED!
Not only did I get snipped. Teitjan had problems finding my left vas deferens and poked and prodded for 20 minutes too long causing post operative complications. It’s not his fault my vas defrens was retracted further than normal so I blame him for nothing. However that doesn’t stop the hemotoma I’ve now developed immediately afterwards because of the complications.
So as I’m typing this article almost 3 weeks to the day later, I have a hard lump the size of a egg in my scrotum. It’s not as bad as it sounds and Teitjan says it should go down after several weeks while the body slowly absorbs it.
Now enough about my castration. Back to Jimbo in the background. Jimbo is able to pay his mortgage down so quickly because he doesn’t have the pleasure of paying for $80/month gymnastic classes, $250 for softball registrations, $640-$1400/month in daycare (when the wife was working), $1000 Christmases, $80 every time a violin string gets severed. I stopped there but that doesn’t include the co-pays and extra money we have to pay for health care costs for the kids.
Sounds like I’m bitching about my predicament with the kids. Trust me, I’m not. I love my life and the challenges that present themselves. The kids keep the wife and I young, entertained, and constantly appreciative.
So while I’d love to have that paid off mortgage in the next five years, I’m going to have to cut back on my intensity towards my goal because our family is evolving at the moment. We’ll eventually get there, but I’ve come to understand that Rome wasn’t built in a day (we’re only 32) and sometimes it’s just not in the cards.
The reason I’m writing this is because even though I can get preachy/demanding towards my goal, I have to realize that my goal is to really be healthy and fit for my kids for as long as I can. I’ve always realized it and have never put the kids or my family second. I just felt I needed to say it loud in case some of you may have forgotten.
Having had this cum-bah-yah moment… we still need to get to work on our secondary goal on becoming debt free so having kids doesn’t let us off the hook.
Posted in Inspirational, Personal debt, Uncategorized, goals, relapses | 1 Comment »
Monday, November 24th, 2008 |
That’s right! The wifey has now been bitten by the layoff bug. Her entire department is no longer with us. I came home for lunch to play Call of Duty 4 on the XBox 360. While I was in the middle of spreading my wrath on some inferior victims I got a phone call from the wifey. She informed me that she’d been let go.
Right away I knew she was serious but for some reason I didn’t even feel an, “awe damn” moment. Truth is, I’ve been telling her for the longest that she needs to find another job. She was comfortable so she stuck with them. Now they forced her hand and she’s currently unemployed.
Now we have to find a way to get health insurance since we were using her health benefits. It doesn’t help that we found out a couple of weeks ago that we’re expecting our 5th child (July 5th ‘09). Meanwhile, I’ve been researching some health insurance possibilities. Besides the expensive COBRA option ($775/ per month) to continue our same benefit coverage, I’ve been using ehealthinsurance.com to get some much more affordable quotes.
All in all, it’s not ALL BAD. For starters, she gets a severance package of 14 weeks pay (2 weeks for the 7 years she’s been there), 1 week of profit sharing as well as her 21 days of vacation pay. To top it all off, she still gets $423/week in unemployment benefits. So once again, our layoff situation may have us coming out smelling like a rose.
It’s feels GREAT to not have worry about a job loss. But at the same time, this is the 3rd big event to happen to us this year in the negative column. 3/21, I Lost my job (quickly found another one). 9/23, I lost my grandfather (he passed away without suffering or anything). Now this.
Notice the trend? Despite the hurdles, we’ve managed to take things in stride and be ok. I feel like everything is changing as I feel that the bad comes in threes. Our luck is finally turning and I’m optimistic about the next couple of months.
For starters, I’m in the middle of opening up a second business (tattooing). I hinted on it earlier in the year and it’s finally coming to fruition. MOdify Tattooing, LLC will be up and operational by the first of the year.
Well here’s to a GREAT ‘09. First round’s on me!
Posted in Inspirational, Personal debt, relapses | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 |
It’s simply amazing how people sacrifice so little to sacrifice a lot. Millions of people around the country are living the American dream and the mountain of debt that goes along with it just because they don’t want to start a (GOD forbid) budget. Check out this story I simply had to shake my head at:
Mary earns an after-tax weekly salary of $675 and gets weekly child support of $142; her income averages $3,462 a month.
Her monthly expenses: $1,485 for rent, $175 for utilities, $275 for a car payment, $361 for car insurance, gasoline and maintenance, $415 for her son’s college tuition, $124 for cable television and Internet service, $350 for grocery bills and $100 for dining out. That’s a total of $3,285 — and it doesn’t include incidental costs for clothing, hair care, gifts or entertainment.
She’s also overdue on several bills, including $282 for medical costs, $233 for a student loan and $80 for 2-year-old phone charges.
In a nutshell, Mary spends close to or more than she earns each month, and she runs out of money before she can make payments on her existing bills. That means there’s nothing left over to pay down her growing debts.
Mary is the first to admit a lot of her financial problems are in her head. She’s always had trouble with money, so her financial woes have become part of her identity — so much so that she carries her folder of bills with her wherever she goes, like a security blanket.
She says she wants to have the means to take vacations and buy presents for her grandchildren, even have a little in the bank for emergencies. But her self-sabotage has stopped her from attacking the real problem: her attitude about money.
Mary, like most people, dreads the “B” word: budget. But budget is not a dirty word. It’s the secret to financial freedom.
Without reading the article any further I immediately so ways to improve her situation in a matter of months. Instead Mary, would rather sacrifice budgeting instead of her attitude about wasting money.
Off the top of my head, I see she could lose some cable television programming and possibly opt for cheaper internet services. She could sell the car and buy something older while at the same time being reliable. Doing so would also lower her car insurance rates.
So lets say she creates a budget and is able to milk $200/month (on the low end) out of the deal. The $80 phone charges would be pai off the first month. That leaves $120 left over for the month. Next month add that up with the $200 and pay off the $282 medical costs. Take the rest and pay off the $233 bill the next month.
After 3 months those debt collectors are paid off and now she has $200 to spend on more debt in order to get the debt reducing snowball rolling.
Life shouldn’t be that hard people. Sacrifice your laughing now so that you won’t be crying later. Reverse the trend!
Posted in Generate income, Informational, Personal debt, education, relapses | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 |
Next time you see that ‘player of the year’ flawsin’ in that 2005
Chrysler 300 sittin’ on 23’s while he’s pulling it into a parking stall
of a rented apartment hand him this article.
USA Today article on Black Spending Habits:
These are tough economic times, especially for African-Americans, for
whom the unemployment rate is more than 10%. Alarmingly, rather than
belt-tightening, the response has been to spend more. In many poor
neighborhoods, one is likely to notice satellite dishes and expensive
new cars.
According to Target Market, a company that tracks black consumer
spending, blacks spends a significant amount of their income on
depreciable products.
In 2002, the year the economy nose-dived; we spent $22.9 billion
($22,900,000,000.00) on clothes, $3.2 billion ($3,000,000,000.00) on
electronics and $11.6 billion ($11,000,000,000.00) on furniture to put
into homes that, in many cases, were rented.
Among our favorite purchases are cars and liquor. Blacks make up only
12% of the U.S. population yet account for 30% of the country’s Scotch
consumption. Detroit , which is 80% black, is the world’s No. 1 market
for Cognac (Pass The Co———).
So impressed was Lincoln with the $46.7 billion ($46,000,000,000) that
blacks spent on cars that the automaker commissioned Sean ‘P Diddy’
Combs, the entertainment and fashion mogul, to design a limited-edition
Navigator complete with six plasma screens, three DVD players and a Sony
PlayStation2.
The only area where blacks seem to be cutting back on spending is books;
total purchases have gone from a high of $356 million in 2000 to $303
mill! ion in 2002. This short-sighted behavior, motivated by a desire
for instant gratification and social acceptance, comes at the expense of
our future.
The National Urban League’s ‘State of Black America 2004′ report found
that fewer than 50% of black families owned their homes compared with
more than 70% of whites.
According to published reports, the Ariel Mutual Funds/Charles Schwab
2003 Black Investor Survey found that when comparing households where
blacks and whites had roughly the same household incomes, whites saved
nearly 20% more each month for retirement, and 30% of African-Americans
earning $100,000 a year had less than $5,000 in retirement savings.
While 79% of whites invest in the stock market, only 61% of
African-Americans do. Certainly, higher rates of unemployment, income
disparity and credit discrimination are financial impediments to the
economic vitality of blacks, but so are our consumer tastes.
By finding the courage to change our spending habits, we might be
surprised at how far the $631! billion($631,000,000,000.00) we now earn
might take us.
We all send thousands of jokes through e-mail without a second thought,
but when it comes to sending messages regarding life-affirming choices,
people think twice about sharing. So please pass this on.
Knowledge is POWER! Reverse the trend.
Posted in Informational, Inspirational, purchases, relapses | 1 Comment »
