Which would you rather lose?

I am kind of shocked by this article in the Washington Post about homeowners who are current on their credit cards, but not on their mortgages.

They opted to let their mortgage payments go while keeping current on all their cards. “I would rather be late on one thing than on several things,” said [Teesa] Rossman, who works at a local church, pointing to the “very high interest rates” on their cards and the need to keep accessing credit.

I don’t have a lot of deep thoughts on it since I’m super busy at work at the moment, but it does occur to me that folks figure that her logic has some merit. Only one creditor after you, rather than 5. But you’re losing your house? That seems crazy to me.

I don’t understand why they thought they could buy a house going in with no money down. It seems like a poor financial decision on their part.

So this week, some congressmen decided to introduce some legislation for dental heath care for Medicare patients, particularly through S-CHIP. That’s wonderful. Unfortunately, my dental plan really sucks. If I am going to get any more work done, I am going to have to find another job for dental insurance.

You think I am kidding, but I just got denied about $3000 in charges from the dental insurer. So I have to pay about $2900.00. But I have depleted all of my savings and will have to break all of my CD’s. That’s what an emergency fund is for, right?

Um, I’m not so sure. I’ve been a bit of a spendthrift this summer and I am going to have to chalk up the money from somehwere. A goodly portion of it will come out of my FSA funds, luckily. But I only have about $900 left since the initial $3K also came out of FSA. The total surgery was about $6K this year. I am saving the maximum $5K in my Medical Flexible Spending Account, but I have some other stuff like eyeglasses that also deplete those funds.

I have to do some serious scrambling here. I will be fine. I just shake my fist at myself and remind myself that I shouldn’t have slacked off on the saving. I think I’m going to have to tell my mom that she can’t have my bonus next year for her house project. The more I think about it, the more I want to keep the money as an emergency fund.

But the good news is that if I decide to skip my wishes for laser eye surgery, I won’t have to save $5K in FSA next year. *sigh* Forgoing my wish to have all my major medical conditions permanently resolved really stinks, but I am going to have to wait two more years. Crud. If I do that, the surgery no longer becomes cost effective and I’ll have to ride around with prescription eyewear.

Remember kids: FLOSS. FLOSS. FLOSS.

I am totally unmotivated to blog anything or write about money. I don’t think I’m doing well with my financial challenges at the moment. Mostly I am feeling blue and staring at the mess of papers in my apartment wondering when did I let it all go to pot?

So the brief fiscal note is this:

I spent about $25 on groceries on Sunday afteroon. I bought limeade on sale, a loaf of bread, cold cuts for sandwiches, a rotisserie chicken and the ‘fixings’ for another excellent broth. I consider this a good disciplined list as I was starving and could have gone overboard, but I even passed on the chip aisle and got only a half dozen eggs so I can try to have brekkie at home. (BTW, the chicken is now $4.99 on Sundays, instead of $3.99, but still cheaper than the $6.99 it usually is.)

I have about 6 quarts of broth cooling in the fridge today. I hope to freeze a good chunk of it for soups later in the fall season. As it is, I need to debone the boiled meat, de-fat the broth and do some recipe planning tonight.

I think I need to buy some egg noodles and make some chicken noodley soup. The rest of the meat will become dinner for me when I get home every night. (Tuesday being an exception this week, because that’s when I step out to knit.)

Medical FSA receipts are missing. Crud.

My desk is a mess right now and it’s showing in my finances. It’s terrible. I dislike going on vacation sometimes because it really throws my routine off. I don’t think I’ll be visiting CA again without my own computer. It was a mess trying to get access with secured laptops. You turn around to watch the baby and boom, locked out and requiring a finger swipe for security.

And now I can’t find my eye exam receipt for FSA. I had the forms. I thought I faxed them, but now it’s AWOL.

*sigh*

Get your organizers. Put stuff away. It takes 10 minutes a day. Set a timer. Get it done.

I forgot to tell you guys that the new TripleTred tires drive really well in the rain. They have a better feel on the road and I’m really glad I sank the money into them. Yes, they do corner better and I feel like they improve my handling at higher speeds. They were worth the money.

Even better is that there was an offer for a $40 Visa card as a rebate on my purchase. (It’s a promotion that’s still going on. I saw a sign for it again today at the Goodyear store.) I came back from the holiday weekend and found that my Visa card was waiting for me! WOO HOO!

So the plan is to use it to buy a trickle charger for my motorcycle, which I ordered from a small repair shop that was highly recommended to me. (I hope he takes Visa. He actually might not. I didn’t even think of that. Who doesn’t in this day and age?)

I spent my extra day off going to banks in VA and MD, ordering the charger, getting a car wash, buying a new shredder, catching up on blogs, and cleaning my apartment. Wednesday was a good day.

The ding is that the shredder was a lot of money. But I think it’s worth it since I’ve broken two home office shredders already, and the tall industrial shredder at work doesn’t like me either because I dump fistfuls of paper into at a time. Who has an hour to wait for shredding? I am Fawn Hall on steroids. (Please God, I hope my readers remember who she is. I’m not *that* old.)

The other ding is that I used the local car wash place ($14) that’s ‘touchless’. Honestly, it’s not that much better than the car wash place ($8) at the gas station by my office. The wheels are a lot cleaner, but still dirty. They don’t do the greatest job, so I was still wiping them down with Armor All and hitting up the windows with Rain-X when I got home. There is getting a good value from an awesomely powerful new shredder, and then just wasting your money between two things that are roughly the same. Now I know. I won’t use the place near home. Always get a wash at lunchtime instead.

Hat tip to Hazzard at Everybody Loves Your Money for the Kiplinger’s story link. There is also a video for this inspiring story about Earl Crawley.

This story brings me to tears. Mr. Earl is an inspiration. Just today I drove up to Charm City and marveled at how much it’s changed since I argued with city council chair Mary Pat Clarke all those years ago for more economic development and better zone near campus so students would want to spend their money there instead of in the suburban malls outside city limits. It’s changed so much. I only wish it could have happened sooner. But I digress with my disgusting sentimentality. Sorry.

In the video, you find out Mr. Earl started out small, with savings stamps, then savings bonds, mutual funds and then one share of stock which led to dividends and making his money work for him. (Heck, I don’t even know what a savings stamp is! Per Wikipedia, he must have been saving them since elementary school. See? Start them young!)

In spite of the urban poverty all around Baltimore after desegregation, Mr. Earl saved what he earned and was able to amass a sizable nest egg on $12/hour. So no matter what, it’s how you live, what you spend and what you keep that counts. Nobody is going to come down and hand you $500K. You have to work at it over time.

Ok, so the projected plan is to have one credit card down to less than $9K by the end of the year.

Alrighty. This was drafted at a ridiculous hour, so pardon me for poor thought processes.

The main thing is that August was a three paycheck month. I’m holding a lot of extra cash right now and frankly, it’s skewing the numbers. My car’s valuation came from the county assessor’s office. I still have a lowball valuation. They think it’s worth $5,550, but they haven’t seen the dent from the hit and run. Somehow, the market rebounded slightly at the end of the month to put me over the $50K mark. That’s nice. Kind of nutty if you ask me. I missed my goal by $453.29.

I am barely making a dent in the credit cards. GRRR. Since I’m taking an extra day off of work this week, I am going to close a languishing credit union savings account and throwing that money at my credit cards. I should have done it a long time ago, but for some reason I was sentimentally attached to the credit union for giving me a credit card consolidating loan all those years ago. For a long time, this $400.00 represented all the savings I had. It was my mini-emergency fund. If I really needed it, I’d have to run to Baltimore to go get it. Well, that day is here. I’ll have to adjust the Save-O-Meter, but the Debt-O-Meter will get adjusted as well. (After all that transferring around is done.)

I need to stop being so emotional about money and get this debt paid off. That’s all there is to it.

Hello everybody!

Please bear with me as I change up the site a little. I am still on Pacific Daylight Time and I’m not quite ready for sleep.

My advertising contract is over so I’ve pulled the Interest.com ads and replaced them with the Adsense ads I originally had, but with a custom color palette that matches the site. What do you guys think?

If anyone is interested in paid links, please email me for rates and placement in the sections marked on the sidebars.

Returning to real posting later today after I run an important financial errand.