Progress
Week 3 Budget Wrap-up – 1/15/10 thru 1/21/10
Jan 23rd
DAMN!!! Well, I can’t say my budget was on point this week. Birthday dinner for my wife, and little purchases took its toll on my funds but hey…I’ll do better next time. However, I have been putting a great dent in my largest credit card debt. Regardless of the expenses I’ve been nailing myself with, I’m still on track.
| Week | Item Description | Amount | Remaining budget ($100) |
| 1/21/2010 | Groceries | $ 23.64 | $ 76.36 |
| 1/21/2010 | Gas – civic | $ 18.23 | $ 58.13 |
| 1/21/2010 | Birthday dinner – sushi | $ 115.00 | $ (56.87) |
| 1/21/2010 | Dinner – Toastmasters | $ 20.00 | $ (76.87) |
| 1/21/2010 | BART ticket purchase | $ 20.00 | $ (96.87) |
| 1/21/2010 | Home Depot | $ 2.34 | $ (99.21) |
| 1/21/2010 | ATM fee | $ 2.50 | $ (101.71) |
Woot! 16% reduction in one month on my credit card debt!
Jan 19th
Pretty cool day actually for me. My initial budgeting has allowed me to finally see some progress against my debt. I’m trying my best using the snowball maneuver taught by the Automatic Millionaire which follows these ideas:
- Categorize all your debt by interest rate – Highest to lowest.
- Budget to pay only the minimum on all debts except your highest interest rate debt.
- This first debt gets all your extra cash to pay off as fast as possible
- Then after satisfying your first debt, you roll that same amount you were paying in the next highest interest debt.
- After a while your amount to pay is the same amount you normally would be paying, just lumping all your previous debts together to create the Snowball of debt removal.
Today, I started that snowball off and in a big way. 16% was reduced, or 1250 bucks in one shot. Talk about painful man… It’s really tough but its wonderful to think that I could after all my debt is over with keep all that cash. The interest payments alone were the worst part of my month honestly, and they are getting down there. Especially after the banks are having huge swings in the variable interest rates of their credit cards to protect against the government trying to do some fixing to the %’s. Example of that linked here http://www.defendyourdollars.org/2009/11/credit_card_freeze_bill_frozen.html
This is just a drop in the bucket, but its a damn good start. Soon enough I will be feeling the benefits of recovering my money from all the interest I was paying.
Join me, and rock out on your debts too. SHAKKINO!!!!
Week 2 Budget Wrap-up – 1/7/10 thru 1/14/10
Jan 15th
YES!!! I’m pretty much getting the hang of my budget, and learning to live within the constraints needed in order to get myself out of debt. It’s really not a constraint thou considering how most of the other folks in the world live. For my 100 dollars per week budget, most families in India could live for a month. My friend came back from almost two months in India and was telling me all about how going back home for him was a bit of a shock. He is now super successful, but seeing his former neighbors, people living in sub optimal conditions etc has really given him a sense of appreciation. So maybe that would be a nice topic for a post…more to come.
| Week | Item Description | Amount | Remaining budget ($100) |
| 1/14/2010 | Grocery – Curry stuff | $ 12.73 | $ 87.27 |
| 1/14/2010 | Sunny Sushi | $ 22.00 | $ 65.27 |
| 1/14/2010 | Walgreens – Misc | $ 9.45 | $ 55.82 |
| 1/14/2010 | Trader Joes – Grocery | $ 12.15 | $ 43.67 |
| 1/14/2010 | Gas – Ninja | $ 9.01 | $ 34.66 |
| 1/14/2010 | Lowes – Whiteboard materials | $ 12.48 | $ 22.18 |
| 1/14/2010 | Target – Markers/cleanings stuff | $ 10.56 | $ 11.62 |
| 1/14/2010 | Welcome lunch – Coworker | $ 15.00 | $ (3.38) |
Not too bad, look at that!! Only 3 dollars and change off from my 100 dollar budget. Slowly but surely I’ll bring down my spending, and then those credit cards will melt away.
Thanks all for your support and kind emails!
The start of the Debt King’s Journey
Jan 1st
Welcome to Shakkino! This will be an interesting experiment, and I’m glad to have you with me on the journey. I ask of you only two things if you wish to follow my progress.
1) Keep me honest, and make sure to ask for specifics if you want to know more. Why did you need to buy that? What purpose would that item serve to your goals?
2) Join my journey! If you can get some knowledge as to how to deal with your own debt, lets do it together. The purpose of this site is to make my journey public as having the pressure to succeed among your peers is much greater than going it alone.
Debt…it’s a dirty word for most American’s but an unfortunate reality for the majority of us in our 20’s. I was a little bit of a late adopter to the debt lifestyle but when I started….I just never stopped. I was able to pay for the first couple years of my college, but with tuition hikes and not being able to cover all the tuition anymore…in came the “soft, fuzzy, not a big deal” student loans. This was the first time I had borrowed more money than I could possibly pay back in a year. The amount of cash they would give you was always more than the tuition..but I wasn’t going to say no to cash with 0% interest and no payments. I took every dollar that the student loans would allow. I even used the excess cash to try to start a car importing business (that failed hard…I can write about that in the future if you really want to know). The cash was used for computers, electronics, buying a car, etc. The lack of having to pay made it the best part of my year when I could get more student loan cash. I’m sure a couple of you out there had the same feelings. Being that Accounting was my major in school…Seemed like I was doing the right thing since everything was accrual’s rather than actual cash. <– You can see the beginning of the problem. More >
