Finance Gets Personal

Unfortunately, my 8-Week Home Cure has quickly turned into the 3-Month Basement Cure.

For a while, I was able to work on cleaning and organizing the upstairs while my husband worked on the basement. But now he’s needing my help more and more, and the Cure has fallen to the wayside.

Maybe the reason I haven’t been blogging lately is that I feel like a hypocrite. Every time I set some lofty goal, I end up abandoning it halfway through. I think the only goal that I’m actually making continuous progress on is getting out of debt. But even with that, it’s hard to feel like I’m making a lot of headway…

I guess it’s hard to stay motivated when your only debts are a pair of mortgages. I’m still making my minimum extra debt payment of $1,974 a month. But what ever happened to snowflaking every extra dollar toward debt? Instead, I’ve become sidetracked with home renovations, vacations, weight loss, trying to get pregnant, etc. Which I guess is to be expected. But I’m feeling a bit like a Jesus Freak that’s fallen off the wagon. Am I headed toward the dark side, or just human?

Maybe money became such an obsession that it’s just ingrained in me now. I’ve learned most everything I can learn (roll eyes here), and know what I should be doing. Now it’s just a matter of whether I want to.

If you’re feeling this way too, check out this post from Get Rich Slowly: Should Repaying Debt Be an Obsession?. My answer is, I’m not sure. Am I a J.D. Roth, who paid off $35,000 over the course of three years, or a Money Saving Mom, who is quickly saving up to buy a house outright?

Maybe I’m somewhere in between.

Photo Credit: Thomson’s gazelle by [PS], used under Creative Commons licensing.

Try an Anti-Charity.

I read about this in The Oprah Magazine, and it’s a great idea!

Whether you’re trying to get out of debt, lose weight or be on time to work, it helps to have some sort of punishment and reward system. For example, I have a rewards system for getting out of debt: Every time we pay off a debt, our family goes to eat dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings (yes, that’s really all it takes for me).

However, I’ve had very little success with weight loss and punctuality, so perhaps it’s time to raise the stakes. I’ve previously considered charging myself money when I fail to reach my goals, but I’d probably just end up snowflaking that into debt repayment (Which I love, remember? Mmm…chicken tender wrap with teriyaki sauce!).

I could donate it to charity, but it’s hard to feel too bad about that.

Unless…It’s an Anti-Charity!

Goal-setting website stickk.com defines an anti-charity as any organization you strongly oppose or which promotes values which are most contrary to your own. For example, if you have a “She’s a baby, not a choice” bumper sticker on your car, you’d probably work pretty damn hard to not donate to Planned Parenthood.

How fantastic!

The phrase “living paycheck to paycheck” gets thrown around a lot, but the truth is, I don’t really understand what it means.

Here are some possible definitions:

1. Not having enough money in savings to survive for a reasonable amount of time without a paycheck (i.e., not having a three-month emergency fund)
2. Spending your entire paycheck (or more) and not saving any money (i.e., not making any financial progress)
3. Commiting so much of your paycheck toward debt-repayment and/or savings that you are dependent on your next paycheck to pay upcoming bills (i.e., me)

I’m inclined toward the first definition, but I’m not sure. What do you think?

(This post was included in the Carnival of Personal Finance, hosted by Lazy Man and Money.)