Philip and I have been doing something right, unfortunatly I can't even pinpoint it...
You see back when we were floundering and our debt had us stumped I signed on for Mint.com. We made a nice little budget and had things moving along. Then my bank decided to become an impenetrable fortress, Mint was having difficulty getting information from my account and things became unrealiable. So I stopped using Mint.
The problem with my family's finances has always been that I spend all fucking day doing the company's finances the last thing I wanna do when I get home is open mail, i'd rather swim in hot sauce. I have discussed this with Phil, expressed my need for help and his idea of helping me is telling me to pay our bills or retrieving the mail and then handing it to me. I end up coasting along, giving everythign there minimum balance and picking one to give whatever I can spare in hopes of knocking that one out soon.
Most of my bills are paid automatically online, so once I scheduled the minimums and the one to pay more to, theoretically I only need to open the mail for the utilities. Well somewhere along the line a due date changed and I was paying a $20.00 minimum and getting a $30.00 late charge on top of the interest im only paying a couple bucks off the balance...
Phil discovered this after checking our mail for me after an entire month of me not checking it at all. I got away with it cause I would randomly send the utilities whatever I "Thought" we owed them. My thought process was somewhere along...
"Hmm, im nice and toasty on the couch tonight, ill send the gas company $200.00 instead of $100.00, actually my feet are sweating, make that $225.00"
It was working, all our utilities stayed on! lol...
A light flipped on in Phil's mind and he decided to actively participate. We went over the mail together, he had to tie me to my office chair for me to go along with it-on my lunch break! Anyone who doesnt have a super exhilerating job knows how precious the lunch break is!
It was extremely painful for me. I fear I will always be the type of person to simply ignore bad stuff. Its mostly a good quality, but in this situation a very bad quality. I just made it clear to Phil that if I hear him say "YOU" one time I was gonna dragon kick him in the face! He likes to blame me for everything when he knows good and damn well I told him to take over and begged him to help.
Oddly enough in the past few months when I was blindly paying bills, we were doing alright. We didn't realize it at the time but looking back we went a good long period of time without having to take a pay advance and without getting an over draft...
This month is the first month Phil and I both took all our bills and laid them out and hatched a plan and actually executed it.
After I looked at the necessary payments, we had quite a bit left...(notice to the non poor people to you its prolly a GMC Acadia Payment)...so we decided to keep $300.00 for us to live on and pay off my Chase Visa Amazong Card $518.00 dollars! Yup, I just paid off a credit card in full. I can't recall now and its of no interest to you all but we paid off maybe 3 other cards with very small balances. I even called one up and Jewed my balance down by $190 dollars!
Sure we only have nothing to live on now until March 1st. That $300.00 evaporated into almost nothing by the time the payments left the account. Phil has a speeding ticket to take care of (prolly has a bench warrant out for his arrest) and I have to play poker tonight...
It's ok though, if I can restrain myself from overdrafting we really don't have many outside expenses anymore, we have two entire deer in the freezers, a basement full of potatoes and Remi doesn't have a baba anymore cause he is such a big guy...
Anywhoo, im tickled that our bills seem manageable again. We have devised a plan to pretty much get ride of all of our stupid debt by late summer. We never really even had tht much, it just wasn't getting taken care of. Would you believe I still owe $1,000 dollars on that godforsaken computer I bought over 3 years ago!? Yea...
It would appear that you are beginning to work as a team and deal with your expenses. Along with getting rid of cards. (they are the work of the devil! That's what I tell my children!) Good for you. I just know it's a wonderful feeling. Keep up the good work.