Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Locked thread
signalnoise
Mar 7, 2008

i was told my old av was distracting


E/N poo poo begins here. Skip this if you only care about the numbers.

To get it out of the way, the first 15 years of my life were lovely. The next 5 were ok. I found the woman who is now my wife at 20. For the next couple of years I lived with my parents through college until it was too much bullshit at home and it pushed me out. I then racked up a bunch of student loans paying for housing and poo poo. I graduated in 2007 with a philosophy degree and no real experience, so I taught English in Japan for a year and made no real progress. When I came home my mom was still pretty crazy and eventually I moved into my then fiancee's house with her parents. My now father-in-law was very much interested in seeing me succeed, and pushed me to get a master's degree. I started in 2010 and in 2012 I got a job that I hated for 3 years. At the end of 2014 I managed to finish my master's and now I hold a MSIS in Computer Information Systems and a shitload of student loan debt. I started a job making 60k at the beginning of 2015. On July 16th, 2015, at the suggestion of my father-in-law, I bought a house with my wife. I'm 32 years old, and I've spent a total of 2 years of my life paying my own rent without needing loans to do so. For the third time in my life, I'm about to pay rent again.

Am I an adult now? Can I put on the big boy pants?

End E/N. Let's put it behind us and work towards the future.

The Debt

I just took out about 5000 to kill a credit card balance. We're keeping 3000 in our credit union account for emergencies right now, plus 2000 in our joint checking account as a revolving balance to pay bills. If poo poo gets hosed up beyond measure, we can lean on my in-laws because they're pretty well off I think, but they want to see us handle our own business if we can. This all leaves us with 2500 dollars for any kind of furniture we need or whatever. Fortunately the house we bought is in AMAZING condition. New windows, new AC, new water heater, all that poo poo. There's about 3000 dollars worth of work that needs to go into the house that my father in law is fronting the bill for with the expectation for us to pay it back some mystery time in the future. I've also applied for pay-as-you-earn on my student loans.

I make 60000 a year before taxes and per diems. My wife makes about 28000. Combined, after withholding and medical insurance and other stuff we don't see in our checking account, we get about 5000 a month into our checking accounts.

More accurate numbers will come with time.


I have made this thread at the suggestion of other posters. May the criticisms come and may I not be a little bitch about it. Let's get me into a manageable state of affairs.

signalnoise fucked around with this message at 23:22 on Jul 18, 2015

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

My Rhythmic Crotch
Jan 13, 2011

Could you update the spreadsheet with the minimum payments for the CCs and mortgage?

Edit: was the $5k to kill a credit card the Delta Amex, or what? I'm presuming so since it's the only one with a zero balance.

My Rhythmic Crotch fucked around with this message at 00:06 on Jul 19, 2015

signalnoise
Mar 7, 2008

i was told my old av was distracting

My Rhythmic Crotch posted:

Could you update the spreadsheet with the minimum payments for the CCs and mortgage?

Edit: was the $5k to kill a credit card the Delta Amex, or what? I'm presuming so since it's the only one with a zero balance.

Yeah it was to kill the delta amex. Gimme a bit to get the data on the minimum payments for poo poo I wasn't able to find before.

pig slut lisa
Mar 5, 2012

irl is good


I'm impressed and happy that you weathered your introduction to BFC in the newbie finance thread and have decided to come back and make your own. Looking forward to seeing you tackle all this.

moana
Jun 18, 2005

one of the more intellectual satire communities on the web
Samesies. I'd like to see your spending averages once you get Mint up and running, and let's make a budget! But the main questions first: Do you spend more on Star Wars figurines than retirement savings? Does your wife drive a Mini? How much money would you say you spend on high-quality BASIL each month?

I think you'll be fine as long as you're willing to look the situation head-on once you start tracking spending and budgeting that income.

signalnoise
Mar 7, 2008

i was told my old av was distracting
Gonna be honest here, I have no intention of looking at my previous spending, because I don't want to give myself any self-negotiation anchor points based on the past.

As far as my wife's car she drives a fully-paid Ford Escape :)

Do I spend more on minis than retirement? Yes. That'll be changing.

El_Elegante
Jul 3, 2004

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
Biscuit Hider
Ok. This a good first step! And you are being pretty brave sharing this.

Your next steps are:
Sitting down with your wife and figuring out your financial and life goals (including things like having children/having college funds, planned car purchases, vacations, and retirement most of all).


Identifying how much money you spend in a pay period and what you spend it on.

I cannot emphasize enough you need to sit down and have calm conversations with your wife.

signalnoise
Mar 7, 2008

i was told my old av was distracting

El_Elegante posted:

Ok. This a good first step! And you are being pretty brave sharing this.

Your next steps are:
Sitting down with your wife and figuring out your financial and life goals (including things like having children/having college funds, planned car purchases, vacations, and retirement most of all).


Identifying how much money you spend in a pay period and what you spend it on.

I cannot emphasize enough you need to sit down and have calm conversations with your wife.

Already did. We don't want kids, we want a comfortable retirement, we're riding our cars out until it's no longer cost efficient to repair them, and we don't really get vacations because our PTO is generally reserved every year for projects.

slap me silly
Nov 1, 2009
Grimey Drawer
You have $12000 in credit card debt that is weighing you down and that there is no good justification for - so, I'd suggest you start there, pay minimums on everything else. Sounds like that's what you're doing already. Do you have a sense yet of how much extra you can throw at the cards every month? Are you still using the cards, and if so, how are you keeping your usage under control?

signalnoise
Mar 7, 2008

i was told my old av was distracting
Yeah, the plan is I continue to use a credit card for my work expenses, but actually pay them down every month before the grace period with my reimbursement. Don't know how much I can throw at extra CC principal yet but it'll likely be at least a few hundred.

El_Elegante
Jul 3, 2004

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
Biscuit Hider
Ok. Regarding retirement planning: when? Work until you qualify for the full social security benefit? Retire with the partial benefit? retire early and use savings to cover you until you claim benefits?

What's your planned retirement lifestyle like? Lots of travel? will it be more or less expensive than the life you lead now? Where will you live?

slap me silly
Nov 1, 2009
Grimey Drawer
I would not even bother thinking about retirement savings until all the credit card and student loan debt is gone. Only exceptions would be if there is a 401k match available, or if some kind of repayment plan or forgiveness is available for the student loans.

signalnoise
Mar 7, 2008

i was told my old av was distracting

El_Elegante posted:

Ok. Regarding retirement planning: when? Work until you qualify for the full social security benefit? Retire with the partial benefit? retire early and use savings to cover you until you claim benefits?

What's your planned retirement lifestyle like? Lots of travel? will it be more or less expensive than the life you lead now? Where will you live?

I have not bothered thinking that far ahead in my life. For all I know we'll cash out and move to Belize. My situation has changed significantly several times already in my first 30 years. What the next 30 years holds for me is still in a deep fog yet to be explored.

I will be doing the maximum match for 401k, and if I get my pay-as-you-earn I expect to have about 70k forgiven after 20 years.

pig slut lisa
Mar 5, 2012

irl is good


Yeah, retirement contributions outside of getting the match should be off the table

Acid Queen
Aug 29, 2006

guaranteed to tear your soul apart
Hullo! Signal's wife here posting in this thread to add more info to the sitch. Feel free to ask me questions about spending, I will tell you how cheap I am (born and raised to be a cheapo). edit: ethnic family woop woop, sorry if it sounded racist!

Credit Cards -- All of them are out of my wallet and in a desk drawer since April. Following advice, when the opportunity arose, I took a "promotional 0% apr balance transfer" from one of the Amex's to the Chase card, so that is one year of 0%.

Old Navy - whoops totally me. Had to get that "professional" wardrobe. They just sent me a new one, but I have tossed it in a drawer and refuse to activate it.

I am now in Grad School, and one of the ideas is to take the remainder of my loan distribution (coming in Sept) and pay it towards Signal's private loans. Or should we make sure to toss it at the Credit Cards?

Acid Queen fucked around with this message at 03:13 on Jul 19, 2015

slap me silly
Nov 1, 2009
Grimey Drawer
Heeeey no racism in BFC please. I think what makes the most sense for loan money that you don't need is to pay it back to the loan it came from. Especially since student loans are supposed to be spent on educational expenses, right? Don't put yourselves in the position of illegally using loan money for personal expenses.

Good job with the credit cards by the way!

signalnoise
Mar 7, 2008

i was told my old av was distracting
One of the things we've been doing is using personal spending accounts. We both have checking accounts with USAA that will decline a purchase rather than letting you overdraft, and have no minimum balance penalty. Using these checking accounts, we put any fun money we have into those so we can see exactly how much money we can spend on bullshit. The problem really has been that I am terrible at fun money. I always want more stupid poo poo and so the amount that we give ourselves as an allowance for this is 100 bucks a week. Sometimes, that's still not enough for me. Still, this is wayyyyy better than it used to be when I had no method of controlling my fun money spending.

What is your suggestion for curbing my fun money habits?

What kind of purchases should be considered fun money rather than a "legitimate expense"?

pig slut lisa
Mar 5, 2012

irl is good


It's hard to define for someone else what is "fun money" vs a "necessary expense". Certainly there's an objective standard somewhere--you're in no place to buy plane tickets to Hawaii--but it's also not the case that you need to e.g. go pick up another job and never do so much as touch a video game, watch a tv show, play miniatures with friends, etc. Recreation is important, even in the depths of debt.

With that said, maybe you can answer the question yourself. If I said "you can't spend a dollar on fun money for three months", what would that mean to you? What purchases would you be avoiding?

signalnoise
Mar 7, 2008

i was told my old av was distracting

pig slut lisa posted:

With that said, maybe you can answer the question yourself. If I said "you can't spend a dollar on fun money for three months", what would that mean to you? What purchases would you be avoiding?

Games and game accessories

Star War Sex Parrot
Oct 2, 2003

signalnoise posted:

Am I an adult now? Can I put on the big boy pants?

signalnoise posted:

Games and game accessories
I'm sure you're being facetious, but based on current discussion: part of being an adult means coming to terms with wanting something and realizing that you can't (or really shouldn't) buy it. Find ways to be happy with what you have, get validation out of savings goals and new experiences rather than short term endorphin fixes from buying new poo poo that always seem to escalate from one to the next. Please feel free to tell me I'm full of poo poo if this doesn't apply to you, but it applies to most of my friends with spending issues so I feel comfortable generalizing a bit.

Is that $100 per week to each of you in fun money? $800/mo seems like a lot to me given your income. Kudos to already having a system for budgeting that spending, though.

Star War Sex Parrot fucked around with this message at 07:30 on Jul 19, 2015

pig slut lisa
Mar 5, 2012

irl is good


signalnoise posted:

Games and game accessories

I'd suggest trying to go 90 days without purchasing any gaming stuff. You can even set a target for yourself upon successful completion (e.g. $100 on day 91). If you can't go 3 months without buying any new gaming stuff, it raises the question of why you spend money on it at all. Presumably you've been buying gaming stuff for quite awhile, so if you can't make it 90 days without buying something new it's a real indictment of both your past purchases (why'd you buy it if you got bored of it so quickly?) and your future ones (aren't you just going to cast this aside in the near future?).

signalnoise
Mar 7, 2008

i was told my old av was distracting

Star War Sex Parrot posted:

I'm sure you're being facetious, but based on current discussion: part of being an adult means coming to terms with wanting something and realizing that you can't (or really shouldn't) buy it. Find ways to be happy with what you have, get validation out of savings goals and new experiences rather than short term endorphin fixes from buying new poo poo that always seem to escalate from one to the next. Please feel free to tell me I'm full of poo poo if this doesn't apply to you, but it applies to most of my friends with spending issues so I feel comfortable generalizing a bit.

Is that $100 per week to each of you in fun money? $800/mo seems like a lot to me given your income. Kudos to already having a system for budgeting that spending, though.

I'm not at all being facetious. I feel like I have adult imposter syndrome. I'm moving into a new house, I have a master's degree, I have a legit career-worthy job, but I feel like I've been someone else's kid with someone making all my life decisions for me my whole life.

Probably something we need to do is gradually reduce our fun money budget until it's down to like 50 bucks a week or so.

pig slut lisa posted:

I'd suggest trying to go 90 days without purchasing any gaming stuff. You can even set a target for yourself upon successful completion (e.g. $100 on day 91). If you can't go 3 months without buying any new gaming stuff, it raises the question of why you spend money on it at all. Presumably you've been buying gaming stuff for quite awhile, so if you can't make it 90 days without buying something new it's a real indictment of both your past purchases (why'd you buy it if you got bored of it so quickly?) and your future ones (aren't you just going to cast this aside in the near future?).

This is absolutely relevant. I am addicted to novelty. My steam backlog is crazy and my miniatures backlog takes up multiple boxes. I should just paint what I have, and play the games I own, until I need new poo poo because I have run out of backlog.

90 days? This will take years to accomplish.


Reality check: I have spent over 200 dollars on gaming poo poo in the past week. :negative:

signalnoise fucked around with this message at 08:16 on Jul 19, 2015

Inverse Icarus
Dec 4, 2003

I run SyncRPG, and produce original, digital content for the Pathfinder RPG, designed from the ground up to be played online.

signalnoise posted:

This is absolutely relevant. I am addicted to novelty.

This is easy to say, but takes a lot of restraint to do things about.

The "NEW! SHINY! MINE!" chemicals are very real, and they feel really good.

Acknowledge that, and try to get the same feeling from other places. And every once in a while, budget for a new shiny thing.


To poke at your budgeting a bit, I'll ask a few questions about an area that people usually overspend on: Food.
- How much do you spend on food each month? (Separate out Restaurants and Groceries)
- What sort of groceries do you buy?
- How much of your food spoils, or gets thrown out?
- How many times per week to you eat out or have fast food?
- Can you or your wife cook? Are you willing to learn?

signalnoise
Mar 7, 2008

i was told my old av was distracting

Inverse Icarus posted:

To poke at your budgeting a bit, I'll ask a few questions about an area that people usually overspend on: Food.
- How much do you spend on food each month? (Separate out Restaurants and Groceries)
- What sort of groceries do you buy?
- How much of your food spoils, or gets thrown out?
- How many times per week to you eat out or have fast food?
- Can you or your wife cook? Are you willing to learn?

1- About 300 bucks a month I'd say
2- None right now
3- None
4- Every day at work
5- Oh god yes. The kitchen was the main selling point in the house we bought. I've been going loving nuts living with my inlaws and not having my own kitchen.

Duckman2008
Jan 6, 2010

TFW you see Flyers goaltending.
Grimey Drawer

signalnoise posted:

1- About 300 bucks a month I'd say
2- None right now
3- None
4- Every day at work
5- Oh god yes. The kitchen was the main selling point in the house we bought. I've been going loving nuts living with my inlaws and not having my own kitchen.

If you don't cook at all I would bet that you may be spending more than you think. If you average just lunch at fast food at $8 (and that's conservative), then multiple 5 days a week for 4 weeks, that's $160 for each of you. So that's $240 of your $300 on lunch. What are you guys spending for breakfast, dinner and snacks if you don't cook? What are you spending on alcohol?

And for the record: food is my personal biggest expense and cost enemy, and tends to be for a lot of people. So if it ends up being a lot, don't worry, you do have company in that issue.

Duckman2008 fucked around with this message at 13:39 on Jul 19, 2015

signalnoise
Mar 7, 2008

i was told my old av was distracting

Duckman2008 posted:

If you don't cook at all I would bet that you may be spending more than you think. If you average just lunch at fast food at $8 (and that's conservative), then multiple 5 days a week for 4 weeks, that's $160 for each of you. So that's $240 of your $300 on lunch. What are you guys spending for breakfast, dinner and snacks if you don't cook? What are you spending on alcohol?

And for the record: food is my personal biggest expense and cost enemy, and tends to be for a lot of people. So if it ends up being a lot, don't worry, you do have company in that issue.

Right now I spend nothing on alcohol. If I have alcohol available, I drink til I'm drunk every night until it's gone. Breakfast and dinner are handled at home. Snacks, maybe 100 a month tops? I'm partial to energy drinks.

signalnoise
Mar 7, 2008

i was told my old av was distracting
Psychologically speaking, maybe it'd be best to start a smartypig account where I deposit less money but eventually make bigger purchases?

I dunno

SpelledBackwards
Jan 7, 2001

I found this image on the Internet, perhaps you've heard of it? It's been around for a while I hear.

signalnoise posted:

Right now I spend nothing on alcohol. If I have alcohol available, I drink til I'm drunk every night until it's gone. Breakfast and dinner are handled at home. Snacks, maybe 100 a month tops? I'm partial to energy drinks.

Are you saying you're eating breakfast and dinner groceries/meals, as well as alcohol that's all bought by the in-laws, and these will go away when you move out?

signalnoise
Mar 7, 2008

i was told my old av was distracting
I generally don't eat breakfast, but I eat dinner with in-laws. I don't drink alcohol usually, because it's dangerous.

FCKGW
May 21, 2006

I feel like you need to get into more specifics where your money is going. Not just food, but groceries vs. eating out. Tell us where your entertainment budget is at and where your household shopping is at, not just fun money.

My suggestion is to hop on mint, pour over the last few months of expenses and spend s couple hours hand categorizing everything. Getting a strong base view of your spending can be a eye opening experience.

Inverse Icarus
Dec 4, 2003

I run SyncRPG, and produce original, digital content for the Pathfinder RPG, designed from the ground up to be played online.

FCKGW posted:

My suggestion is to hop on mint, pour over the last few months of expenses and spend s couple hours hand categorizing everything. Getting a strong base view of your spending can be a eye opening experience.

And if you're open to it, post non-personal information here. Simple things like sharing Mint's pie chart for your spending for a few months might point to some obvious expense you could curb.

signalnoise
Mar 7, 2008

i was told my old av was distracting
I kinda feel like if I go over my previous expenses it's just going to make me feel like it's a good starting point to reduce from. Rather than look at what I've been doing and adjust from that, I think I should budget a reasonable amount to everything and stick to that as a fresh start. Above all else I don't want to dwell on the past. I want to look forward with my budgets where they SHOULD be rather than a marginal difference from where they were.

This is especially because I'm going to have entirely new categories of poo poo to budget for.

signalnoise fucked around with this message at 04:11 on Jul 20, 2015

FCKGW
May 21, 2006

signalnoise posted:

I kinda feel like if I go over my previous expenses it's just going to make me feel like it's a good starting point to reduce from. Rather than look at what I've been doing and adjust from that, I think I should budget a reasonable amount to everything and stick to that as a fresh start. Above all else I don't want to dwell on the past. I want to look forward with my budgets where they SHOULD be rather than a marginal difference from where they were.

This is especially because I'm going to have entirely new categories of poo poo to budget for.

Except these just aren't numbers on a graph these are habits. Spending habits. It's not about making a budget one day and then BAM there you are. It's about looking at your habits, knowing what's essential and what can be reduced and THEN making the budget. Not knowing what your habits are will give you little to no clue on how to form out your budget.

pig slut lisa
Mar 5, 2012

irl is good


I'm confused, signalnoise. When you first posted in the newbie thread you expressed resistance towards estimating future expenses because you don't have a baseline. Now in here you're refusing to use your past habits as a baseline to estimate future spending. Maybe there's a third way of budgeting that I'm unaware of, but it looks like you've shot down the only two ways to actually make a budget. I suppose if you really feel unprepared to proactively budget at this stage you could spend a month or two meticulously tracking expenses and use those as your baseline come October or whatever, but that would strike me as needless delay for a necessary step in fixing your financial situation.

When I clicked for your post history in the newbie thread I noticed that you had visited back in late 2013. Here's an exchange that I think is useful to apply to your current situation (all emphasis mine):

signalnoise posted:

I am really, really lovely with impulse spending. I would like to get some way to limit my spending to an allowance in such a way that I have to do something out of the ordinary to go beyond that limit, so it resonates with me better. Right now I am considering getting a prepaid debit card, but I'm wary of them because they generally cost money every month to use. I definitely need my allowance to be able to be spent on the internet though.

So what's a good way to handle this problem? Criteria:

1- I want to be outright denied, not overdrafted, when I go over budget
2- Must be able to be spent on the internet
3- Preferably not cost me extra money

Should I just eat the 5 bucks a month or whatever it would cost me to get a prepaid mastercard/visa or is there a better way? I have tried just setting a budget for myself but I inevitably go through this up and down cycle of spending a lot in a month or 2, then spending almost nothing for a month or 2 because I have to get back to zero.

Remy Marathe posted:

If you've got truly addictive behavior going on, as soon as you trample a boundary you've set yourself a couple of times that bad feeling will wear off and you'll just be back where you started with a slightly more complicated system. It's great you're fighting a bad habit, but in my experience setting up mousetrap-like prevention mechanisms doesn't work for long, if anything it's reinforcing your acceptance that you are too weak to restrain yourself and offloading the responsibility for your behavior to external forces. In conditioning terms, normal consequences so far have been too far removed to "condition" you to learn impulse control. The second your brain spots that a card rejection isn't the end of the world, especially online, in fact has very little consequence and only requires some shuffling of money, kiss that fragile barrier protecting you from yourself goodbye.

Any new system might work while it's new and interesting to you, so use that time to work on your own thinking and appreciating what not impulse-spending is gaining you, how good it feels to be the person you want to be. Sooner or later instead of playing Spy vs. Spy with yourself you have to become what you want to be, someone who gets that life is just as good without spending binges.

signalnoise posted:

Thanks for this, this is probably really what I need to hear

Maybe it's apples and oranges, but I don't think so. I think what's going on is that you're setting up gimmicks to avoid confronting your problems head on. The spendy part of your brain loves these gimmicks and excuses--"I can't look at past expenses cause then I'll anchor off it"--because it can use them to undercut the responsibility part of your brain.

My suggestion is to go back through the last couple months expenses and categorize everything. Far from weakening your financial mindset as you fear, I predict this will strengthen your resolve. You will have demonstrated to yourself that you have the willpower to confront the negative emotions associated with your past spending, not to mention the fact that you have the perseverance to complete a somewhat boring but absolutely vital task. Understanding your recent past spending will give you a shot of confidence and position you really well to take on the problems you came in here to fix.

KYOON GRIFFEY JR
Apr 12, 2010



Runner-up, TRP Sack Race 2021/22
Can you tell us a little bit about the house buying process? If my parents told me to buy a house with a hundred thousand dollars in debt and one of the two potential breadwinners still in school, I would explain to them that I would buy a house after I had paid down my existing bad debt. Was that not an option for some reason?

The problem is with your debt load of consumer debt PLUS your debt load of the house, if anything goes wrong in your life you are hosed. (or running to the in-laws for money, which is probably not optimal)

I agree with all the other posters that you need to track spending history. Look at some other BFC threads to understand how hard it is to change habits (knyteguy etc).

signalnoise
Mar 7, 2008

i was told my old av was distracting

pig slut lisa posted:

I'm confused, signalnoise.

You make some good points. After work I'll sort through my Mint account.

A GIANT PARSNIP
Apr 13, 2010

Too much fuckin' eggnog


If you want to distance yourself from past spending habits you can list your past expenses, and then provide us with how your months going forward will look different. Saying "I spent $x on eating out the last few months, but going forward I'm only going to spend $y" is a very helpful way to look at things.

pig slut lisa
Mar 5, 2012

irl is good


signalnoise posted:

You make some good points. After work I'll sort through my Mint account.

Great. Don't feel like you need to do the whole 2-3 months in one sitting. Instead, commit to 10 or 15 minutes, plus however long it takes to track today's spending. Then repeat the process daily until you've worked back far enough. It's important to form good money habits, and creating a small but regular routine that accomplishes meaningful work every time ("today I spent 15 minutes reconstituting a week of spending") is an effective way to train your brain into new habits. The first week will be hardest from a mental effort standpoint, but stick with it for 7-10 days and all of a sudden spending a little time every day to track spending will feel much more natural.

Uncle Enzo
Apr 28, 2008

I always wanted to be a Wizard

pig slut lisa posted:

Great. Don't feel like you need to do the whole 2-3 months in one sitting. Instead, commit to 10 or 15 minutes, plus however long it takes to track today's spending. Then repeat the process daily until you've worked back far enough. It's important to form good money habits, and creating a small but regular routine that accomplishes meaningful work every time ("today I spent 15 minutes reconstituting a week of spending") is an effective way to train your brain into new habits. The first week will be hardest from a mental effort standpoint, but stick with it for 7-10 days and all of a sudden spending a little time every day to track spending will feel much more natural.

My wife does something like this- couple times a week she'll open up our bank account and check over everything we've spent, see what checks/payments have cleared, etc. Then she makes sure our monthly spreadsheet is up to date that has all our bills by amount and due date and highlights green the ones that have gone through. Then we know not just "how much money is in the bank account" but also "how much money is unaccounted-for", like if we have 1,050 in the bank but it's the 6th of the month and our rent check hasn't cleared yet, we actually only have available 300, since we have to leave in the rent money. She also makes short-term predictions as to whether or not we can afford something based on when in the month it is, what bills she's paid, our paydates, etc.

It's not technically a "budget", but we also track monthly how much we spend on major categories. When we have some extra cash that isn't spoken for she drops it in our savings account, she puts like 100-200 dollars a month into it, in addition to paying a hundred or two extra into the student loan we're tackling first. When we have a cushion big enough on our savings, we'll start sinking everything extra into the loan. I'm slated for a promotion at the end of the year and we're planning to take 100% of the difference and putting it into loans. We paid off all our 10k of credit card debt already this year and our only debt is our student loans.

You're currently making more than my wife and I combined and your loans are largeish but not unmanageable. You need to zero out those credit cards first. Students loans and mortgages are kind of a different category of debt than CC's, if only in the interest rates and terms.

It can help to just kind of "blue-sky" a budget. You sit down with a sheet of paper or excel or a google doc and you list everything you know of. So you start at the top with what you are both making (take-home). Then you list all your fixed expenses. Housing, car payments, insurance, heat + electric, gas, etc. Just give generous estimates. If you buy gas every other week for 30 bucks put 60 in for gas. Also list all loan payments, minimums, and due dates. (You've already done this part). Then you look at what you have left, then try and estimate "ok we can buy $100 of food per week, so we'll buy 75$ worth of groceries once, then leave the rest for swinging by the store to pick up stuff for a particular meal". Stop eating out. Just stop doing it altogether. Eating out is the budget-killer.

You can do this, OP. You have a pretty decent income, a normal living situation, reasonable cars, and no immediately-visible stupid habits like "sorry guys my $3600 a month on candles is non-negotiable". You can get yourselves into a much better situation with no real change in quality of life. Don't eat out, put as much money as you can every month into the highest-interest rate loan, and you can have most of that CC debt knocked off in ~6-10 months. We have no CC debt and I'm telling you it feels GREAT. Hundreds a month available.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Uncle Jam
Aug 20, 2005

Perfect
I would just match and check all your expenses anyway as a rule, helps prevent fraudulent activity and catch it early so the bank or card company can roll it all back. If you let some $500 charge from some dude buying an iPad with your CC number just stew for a while its going to be harder to fight it.

  • Locked thread