Today is payday, and boy did this one seem a long time coming! After only getting paid $380 last pay (see last post), I ended up putting quite a bit of stuff on my credit card (and, yes, not all of it was necessary needs - bad pf blogger, I know!) But, I made it through and now not only was this pay a full one (no days off) but it also included 7.5 hours of overtime. This is going to help me a LOT in getting back to a place where I feel comfortable and not worrying about money all the time.
I did a few things that may or may not make sense in the grand scheme of things, but its making me feel better for the meantime. 1) I did a balance transfer of $1,000 from my BMO MasterCard to my CapitalOne MasterCard. This brought my BMO card back down to $0 but moved my CapitalOne card up to $2,679.27 BUT, I just put a payment of $700 on that card today. I didn't know how much I would be able to put on that debt before I went for the balance transfer, otherwise I would have just transferred the $300 or not bothered and paid down the MasterCard next month. But, what's done is done and seeing the zero balance on at least one of my debts is good, for now. I just gotta keep focusing on paying it and keeping it all down! (2) I'm stopping my PAC on my e-fund now that its at $1,000. I know this is nowhere close to the 3-6 month amount I should have, but I just feel that for the time being, this should be a good starting point, in case an emergency does happen in the next bit until I can start increasing it. With Christmas being just around the corner, I figured it didn't make sense to split my money in too many directions.
I'm still on the fence about tracking all my money and budgeting down to zero at the moment. I just have a feeling that the next 2 months are going to be crazy and spendy. I know that I just gave a really good reason why I should be tracking and budgeting, but I also know that I'm going to fall off the wagon. Yes, there is still a good reason to try at least and if I fail, I fail, but for the time being, I'm going to leave things as it is. Make automatic savings and major debt repayments first priority, then maybe the tracking and budgeting will come along after that. Or, maybe I have it all backwards? I don't have all the answers, I'm just trying to work things out as best I can for me. I'm still only giving myself $350 to spend out of every paycheque (23% of my takehome pay, less than Gail's 25% for life, hah!) but I'm not going to break it down further than that, then it starts to get depressing :(
I've updated some of my side-bars, it will take some time for payments to go through, so they will change again soon, but this is still showing some progress, in my eyes, so I'm happy. Plus I'm now over the +$5K mark in Net Worth! This is a huge amount of progress considering that when I started this blog my net worth was -$21K :)
Well, that's all I got for now. Take it easy,
Morgaine
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