Tag: debt

  • Uneasy on Sunday Morning

    An account change notice from Verizon inspired a brief and generous presumption that my bill would be lowered due to a large chunk of monthly payment having been extracted.

    That was, of course, a ridiculous notion.

    In any case, friendly advice to the genital pubic: if an exing-relation wished to extract eir service from a shared martial{sic} account, said relation could get an independent line and tether Internet access to eir house over 4G, getting faster speeds than what s/he pays for DSL now.

    S/he may not be able to do that on eir current account, as each line may have a usage cap since the unfortunate demise several months ago of Verizon’s omni-benificent data-usage grandfather.

    Also, s/he could get eir own auto insurance, and probably at a cheaper rate than half of what the other-half pays now, and considering the other-half was probably court-ordered to pay half of what that half had been salaried, and will be paying half (or less than half) now that said half’s company may have expired — well, when the other-half finds a new job that likely will pay half-of-half of that previous half, such a cost-cutting measure would not be for the other-half’s sake but for the sake of all involved.

    And eir medical insurance may expire at the end of the month.

    And s/he should consider public assistance.

    And s/he should definitely find a job that pays the money required to keep eir children in food and clothing and under shelter.

    Especially if s/he hasn’t managed to do so in twelve or more months since kicking eir sole provider out of the house, presumably because s/he has been too busy holding eir children hostage from the other parent with the friendly help of the Mrs Doubtfire gub’mint.

    Speaking of which:  When one is allowed to see ones children only through professionally supervised visitation, and such a court-ordered condition is predicated on demonstrably false accusations involving no danger of harm to said person or eir shared children– Well, they would be demonstrated  false (in this hypothetical case) if the state cared to afford a parent accused of such wispy, nebulous charges an audience to do so,  and considered the emotional support of a single parent (even a *shudder*  “father”) more important to their well-being than an inconceivably remote chance of danger to them that was never actually claimed by anyone

    Er.

    When that is the case, one should consider whether or not the money paid for such visitation might better be spent on feeding ones children.

     

  • I Brake For Debt

    We’ve been trying a “cash budgeting” system for a few months now, and it’s going pretty well.  That is, it covers our variable expenses.  I still use a bank account dedicated to relatively fixed expenses such as rent, utilities, membership dues, and minimum credit card payments.  Most of those are paid automatically, pulled directly from the account.

    Unfortunately, there are two places where the system falls short.  This isn’t so much because of any flaw in the idea of cash budgeting, but due to our limited funds.

    The first is that we don’t have anything left over to pay down the debt besides the aforementioned minimums.  I’ll be relying on my annual bonus to hack away at that fecking demon.

    The second is “unexpected” expenses.  We didn’t fully account for birthdays or other special occasions and gifts.  “Gifts” for us mostly means for the kids (and the increasingly frequent parties they attend), since we don’t usually give them otherwise.  School lunches we could roll into groceries, so that’s not so bad.

    However, there are those big ones that hit you now and again.  Although we do have a “Car” envelope (cash allotted for each expense goes into an olde-fashioned paper envelope), it builds over time.  Over the past week, my front driver-side tire has been angrily grinding under 20MPH.  I finally took the day off today to get it into the shop.  It’s the brakes. And the rusted calipers.  And over $600.

    We ain’t got that much in the envelope.

    So, it’ll probably go on the credit card we just managed to pay off, with last year’s bonus, and I’ll try to pay it off again with the two “bonus paychecks” a year direct-deposited into the dedicated bill-paying account.

    Oh, and I put about ten bucks on the same card for Star Wars miniatures from Miniature Market in an attempt to find one suitable to represent my scoundrel in our Star Wars Saga campaign.  Of course, since these are mostly under a dollar each, I had to buy a dozen or so to avoid paying more for shipping than for the actual merchandise.  Maybe I’ll post a picture when they get here.

    That’s not irresponsible spending, is it?  $10 for my only hobby?

    Back to “working from home” and waiting for the car.