Advanced Personal Finance

Today I’m attending to some very important business, so I’m proud to present this guest post from I’ve Paid For This Twice Already. Paidtwice blogs about her family’s journey to finally pay for all that stuff they bought and become debt-free. Check out her site or subscribe to her RSS feed. Thanks for covering for me!

–oOo–

You might be in too much debt.

I love Jeff Foxworthy’s “You Might be a Redneck” jokes. Lately I’ve been thinking up my own version where the punchline is “You might be in too much debt”. But they’re all about me. All about who I used to be back when I was playing this credit-juggling game with myself and trying to keep all the balls in the air and holding my breath for that inevitable crash.

If the cable goes out and your first thought is if you paid the bill yet….

If you get excited when your credit card sends convenience checks and your first thought is paying the other credit card with them….

If you postdate a check “accidentally” and hope that means they can’t cash it until next week…

You might be in too much debt.

I used to play the 3 am game with myself a lot. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and I couldn’t go back to sleep until I had thought out in my head every bill due and which ones had to be paid on time and which ones didn’t seem to care if it was a few days late and what order I could pay them in so nothing would bounce and I could pay the least amount of fees possible. Utility companies don’t seem to care if they get their money late, as long as it isn’t too late, the cable company doesn’t seem to notice if their due date is the 6th but you call them on the 9th, but pay a credit card 15 seconds late and you could end up with a mountain of fees and a jacked up interest rate. I spent a lot of time and energy keeping my credit card companies happy at all costs.

But one day I finally realized - this was no way to live. There had to be a better way than waking up in a panic in the middle of the night over and over wondering which bill you could put off until after payday and if you were going to have to find a convenience check from one credit card to pay the other and how close the first credit card was to its limit.

Luckily I didn’t have to crash to realize that there had to be a better way to live than this. It took a major mental meltdown on my part at the all the energy and stress it took to keep juggling those balls, but no huge catastrophe initiated me putting away the credit cards, holding my breath and focusing on paying my way out of trouble, whatever it took. I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m not completely there yet, we’re still living paycheck to paycheck, and we’re still in debt. But I’m not juggling which bills get paid on time this month (although I still have to sort them by due date), and when I wake up in the middle of the night it is because my 3 year old has decided to invade my bedroom instead of staying in his own. And the credit card debt is slowly but surely disappearing.

But I still might be in too much debt. I just have to take things day by day and keep hoping I didn’t start too late. But the juggling act becomes simpler by the day as the balls move slower and weigh less.

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 7:00 am and is filed under Guest posts, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.