38 THOUSAND DOLLARS.
Bank of Montreal Mastercard: 16,662.82 @ 18%
Royal Bank Visa: 22,041.96 @11.99 %
Total: $38,704.78.
That’s the number I owe on consumer credit card debt: 38 grand. How the heck did that happen?
Five years ago, I had a net worth of approx 300 thousand dollars, and now: nothing. A negative number of $38,000. Yikes.
I have nobody but myself to blame for this. So, rather than wallowing in fear, self pity and other crappy feelings I’m getting busy. Taking action, and to quote @garyvee I’m crushing it.
I didn’t blow almost 300k in one day and a lot of it just added up, slowly over time. That’s the way credit cards work. It’s not the small big stuff, its’ the dumb and stupid small stuff that gets you in the bind.
So. First of all, an introduction is in order: I am Jim Fitzsimmons. I currently keep my head above water with ramseeker.com, where I monitor memory prices from different online vendors. These vendors pay me to be listed on ramseeker, and pay my rent for another month. So far, so good. There was a time when ramseeker was considerably more profitable and that’s half the battle: Income slowly reduced to due a strong canadian dollar, dropping memory prices and so on..
Where to go? What’s the plan?
Spend less. Make More. That’s pretty much the jist of every personal finance book I’ve read. I’ve got the spending down pretty much: If you’re going to follow along, I might as well share all the numbers with you. I’ve got nothing to hide. I also hope to share future earnings with you as that’s half the fun – seeing if I can dig out of this mess.
My Expenses:
- Rent: $1400/month. All in, including heat, hydro. I have no home phone, and could care less about TV. I don’t even own one.
- Cellular Phone. I’ve just moved and changed plans but both cellular phone and wireless internet should be about $150 monthly.
- Groceries. I have no idea to be honest. I’d guess $100 or so a week. Let’s say $500 for the month. The plan is to start tracking my grocery spending and see how we do. I bet I can save here.
- Entertainment.. I’ve got a great stereo here, a big DVD collection (which I’ll be liquidating) and online access to everything the world’s got to offer so I don’t need much in the ways of entertainment. Let’s say $200/month for round number.
- Storage. This condo I’m currently in doesn’t have any storage, so I’m coughing up $150.monthly in storage fees to hold a bunch of crap I don’t need, but will take time for me to sell. In time, this expense should shrink considerably.
- Grand Total: about $2400/monthly. Wow. I just did my first budget.
Go figure.
The plan is to be debt free in 1000 days. Why 1000 days? It’s a reasonable time. It took me about that long to get those balances that high, so I figure it’ll take that long to get those knocked off. Rome wasn’t built in a day. The first plan is to get 2 months saved up for ‘emergency’, so that’s 5 grand. Then we start chipping away at the debt. Mastercard first I guess as it’s got the highest interest rate. If my math is right, I have to find about $45/day for the next 1000 days to make this happen. $45/day won’t happen right away, but I can work hard at this site and make it happen, I know I can.
Now, I know it’s suggested that you stop using credit cards completely but I’m still going to charge two things, and then pay off monthly: Storage fees for my storage locker full of stuff (the sales of the stuff in there will pay for this) and web hosting for this site and ramseeker.com (ramseeker will pay for the hosting). Perhaps at a later date I can revisit this plan.
This is starting to get a little long, so I’ll finish here. Come along for the journey. It should be fun.
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