Well, I just got paid from a corporate client for my training business. Phew. I have had no income for about a month, and have been really stretching my pennies and living off savings (but NOT living off credit, for the first time in the past 20 years or so when in this situation -- why do I always get in this situation? Perhaps a topic for another blog post). So now that I have a bit of a cushion, I am faced with temptation. When I was little (and a little entrepreneur, always doing chores around the house, starting lemonade stands, selling junk at tag sales), my mother always said "whenever you get a dollar, it burns a hole in your pocket!" She was right.
My temptation now is two-fold -- one is to rush to pay off debts and the other is to buy myself a little "treat" like a massage for the pulled shoulder I have, or take a trip to my favorite used book store, or buy some fabric for some curtains I want to make. I get a very similar psychological reward from both of these thoughts, but I'm going to resist the pull to spend the burning dollars and treat myself to early debt payoff or buying a little something.
I'm going to leave the money in the bank, because I have *just* enough to live on through the end of the year (barring any unforeseen disasters), so instead of splurging now (so tempting after having been totally broke all summer), I am going to pay off my smallest credit card (the Care Credit veterniary account: $277.27), and go back to my system -- I give myself an allowance of $200.00 per week (for groceries, pet food, shopping, house things and gas for the car) and do my best to sock some of that away into savings. I'm saying no to the desire to pay off extra debts, knowing I might need that extra money to pay for essentials later.
So now with Care Credit paid off, I'm down to one 0% interest card with about $800 on it (this was for a new mattress and box spring), one 5.9% credit card that is my rollover/snowball target account ($9200), a home equity loan ($14,000), my student loans (7$0,000 -- an almost unfathomable sum of money), and my mortgage ($139,000).
I gained a new client last week (hooray), so when I get paid from them, I will pay off the mattress loan and put about $1000 into savings. Then I'll be able to really get to work on my rollover/snowball plan of chipping those big balances down. One down -- it feels good to pay that baby off!
