Of shoes and ships - and car wax - Of sprints and marathons. Some people are marathoners. They pace themselves and work steadily away for whatever they do - whether that's cleaning or exercise routines, renovating a house, writing a page or a post a day – or saving 10% of whatever they make ...
Category Archives: debt
Have I become Larry Winget with boobs?
Larry Winget with boobs, hair, no little Amish beard and some other bits? Or my parents. OMG. I've become my parents. This week on the drive in to work, I listened to a phone call where a lady had written into the station asking for help. The name of the program is ...
Credit cards – love them or leave them?
Prior to having one of my credit cards cloned last year, I bought almost everything with a credit card. Contrary to Dave Ramsey's warnings, I haven't found that I spend any more or less when I use cash vs. credit. According to Dave:When you pay cash, you can "feel" the ...
How to Get Out of Debt Part 3 – Ditch Deprivation with a Super Simple Budget
Over the years, I’ve tried everything to make myself stick to a budget. I tried using envelopes for all my spending and ended up constantly borrowing from one envelope in one month and then having extra in another month. Even though I’ve been a numbers geek in my career for over 20 years, I just ...
How to Get Out of Debt – Part 2 – The Stick
Whenever events are controlling you more than you’re controlling them, you’ll experience stress. When you’re in debt, your money isn’t really yours to spend anymore. It has to go to pay for past decisions – or mistakes - that you’ve made. And that sucks.Not having enough money because you’re paying off debt moves you away ...
PF catfight update! – 1 week down 3 to go (and 3 competitors to beat too!)
I’m excited to announce that Christine from Money Funk and Laura from Move to Portugal have joined Barb of Barbara Friedberg Personal Finance and I in the vicious, no holds barred friendly frugal fight to drop our expenses down for the month of June! One of the things I hope that ...
How to Get Out of Debt Part 1.1: Rock bottom
Here’s an excerpt of my diary from November of 1999 in case you don’t know how people who are in debt think (sorry for the language, but I’ve cleaned it up a bit for you). It wasn’t really until then that I got mad at myself enough to DO something about my situation and ...