Renewed determination

These past weeks, even though there’s still chaos going on, I have been adhering myself to my payment/spending plans. My family, however, has not. It is surprising to me that they try so hard to see me broke. Consciously and rather intently. But I digress.

My vacations were both very wonderful! But sorry, no worthwhile photos. I may find some and put in this post later on. I hope Mark won’t hit me with his bat, though I heard he’s taking a bit of a break. While I did have a very cute camera with me, I am still not a very comfortable photo shooter. Plus, my half brother hated me for taking random photos of random things and asked me (read, ordered) me to stop that.

So where was I? I visited New York for 3 days, and Chicago for 8 days. New York with my half brother was just wonderful and relatively luxurious while being extremely cheap. Even though we had a very ambitious agenda, we met almost all of our sight-seeing goals. Price was much higher than I expected. I will break down the budgets in a later post, as I don’t want to ruin this with numbers just yet. We stayed at two very beautiful hotels, courtesy of my employee discount. I must say I love the darn thing. We got lots of sight-seeing, done, managed to get lost in the metro, ate good foods and tried some street foods. Overall, it was a great experience.

Chicago followed, and that was just to chill and relax. You never know when/how much you REALLY need some real down time until you experience it. And I had not had any real down time in too many years, so I was really at peace. Depressingly at peace, as I love this town and my friends in the Windy City, to the point it overshadows anything I have or can obtain here in the East Coast. However, all good things must come to an end, and despite me feeling very, very at home in Chicago, I had to come back. I was very sad, as I truly feel that I have so much over there, and I have so little here (and even portion of that ‘little’ is bad/toxic stuff).

For that, debt, I despise you. You are keeping me away from the only place I have felt truly comfortable at. I vow revenge on you and will not be truly satisfied until you are oh so gone. You hear me?! 12 more months until you start falling apart.

With renewed will and determination, I am once again ready to hammer the heck out of debt. Murphy dislikes my plan BIG time, and he has teamed up with my parents to actively set me back, but that does not matter. Yes, they’ve set me back, no, I don’t feel like talking about it, but yes, I am STILL doing progress, even though my EF and saving funds are gone and snowballs halted for 6 long months.

A few undeserved, unrequested pats on the back from me to me:
- I have paid a total of $750 extra since March started.
- The car loan went below $5,000
- CC1 is at 63% utilization. Still very high, but it had remained at the ~90% range on average since August of last year.
- I have been able to pay my CC3 in full within 3 days of usage. Not even sure if I’ll ever make a debt counter for it, since I am using it as a debit card and I am determined to NOT see it carry a balance. Ever! I don’t want to pay a single penny in interest. (Though I mistakenly may have to, as I am learning about the ‘pay by’ and ‘statement closing’ dates.)
- Thanks to CC3, CC1 is NOT getting used, so there is no way it will ever go up again. It’s on full-repayment method now, and I like that.
- I did my last snowball for the next 6 months, as I gear up to pay for my taxes. This sounds like a negative, but I am glad I was able to maintain snowflakes this far.
- Taxes will be paid off by the end of September.
- I re-revised my spreadsheets, and I am still within a month or two of my original plans.
- I worked 19.5hrs on Saturday. Nonstop. How’s that for a no-spend day? The money from it wont be bad either.
- I signed up for a retirement plan from my part time job I was never informed about. I was eligible 7 years ago and nobody mentioned anything. Oh well. Good thing is they do some matching, unlike my full time employer, so I am contributing a decent amount to get the best out of matching.
- I won a free pizza at Domino’s. Free food is awesome.

I'm catching up to y'all, so bear with me while I fix my desk and go about my business.