2017 is not off to a good start, financially…
In addition to not paying off our credit card, carrying a
balance, and having to pay interest on a card that we haven’t paid interest on
in over 5 years, I have to pay a late fee to DMV.
The late fee came about through a comedy of errors. First,
our car registration was due on January 2, which was an observed holiday, which
I didn’t pay attention to. I was going to pay it the 3rd and hope
for the best. (Knowing the DMV and the government, I wasn’t expecting much, but
I was hopeful.) Also, with everything going on with my dad, the idea of paying
bills flew out the window for a couple few days. However, stupid me, when I did
finally go to pay it, I realized the car needed to be smogged this year. There
is no excuse for that; it’s totally my own fault. The DMV sent me out the
registration several months in advance and I just didn’t look at it closely
until I went to pay it.
The whole point of this rant, though, is that in addition to
having to pay interest on our credit card, I have to pay a late fee on our
registration: that’s stupid tax times two (X2), and I have nobody to blame but
myself! Our car registration was $112 and with late registration, we have to
pay $132. On top of that $20 stupid fee, we had to actually pay to have the car
smogged. We had $170 in our car fund. That helped.
Because we are trying to go back to all cash, at least until
we get our credit card paid off, we took the rest of that money and used it for
a couple different things. We paid to have another car’s oil changed, which was
an “appropriate” use of the money. We also bought movie tickets and a pair of
snow boots for Presley. Those were not what the money was intended for, but
paying cash for those things kept us from going farther into debt. Our car fund
now only has $30, but I budgeted another $200 into the fund over the next
couple months.
The plus side of all this is that our car did pass
smog. We really weren’t sure. It’s 14
years old and has over 230,000 miles. It serves as an “extra” car for us. We
use it if we are taking the dog somewhere or going to Home Depot, things like
that. It has been very nice to have the extra car, but with its age and
mileage, we weren’t sure it would pass smog; at least that wasn’t $53 wasted.
This isn’t the best start to my year, but I guess there’s
not really much way to go but up.
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