Tidbits

Well, my goal was to be under $10000 of credit card debt by my next statement (4/15/17) and sadly, that’s not going to happen. L It’s not going to happen because we fully paid for our trip to Washington D.C. If we weren’t going to D.C., we would have made it. As it stands right now, I am trying to get the statement to be under $11000, including interest. It’s going to be close and actually, in order to make it happen, I need to come up with an extra $150 in the next week and I don’t know if I will be able to.

We did come into some extra money that is all going towards our credit card debt, but it’s just not enough to fall under the $11000 mark. The Husband earned $200, after taxes, in overtime that I already sent towards the credit card! Every little bit helps. The overtime he has been earning has helped to offset the 401K loan we took out. We have yet to have a “normal” paycheck with the loan payment amount being taken out, which is both a good and a bad thing. All the extra, over my estimated take home pay of $1700 has gone towards our credit card debt.

The Boy was very sick and missed 7 days of school, during that time, he missed a field trip (insert sad face) that we had paid for back in September. I was to chaperone and the cost was $30 per person. I received that money back from his teacher yesterday and we will be applying that directly to the credit card as well.

Even with all those little extras, we are still $150 short of making my goal of less than $11000 credit card debt, after interest, on our next statement. I’m trying to figure out a way to make up the shortage. I can roll some change we have, that might yield about $20 or so. And I do have some money in petty cash I could use, this time only, to push towards our goal. Whether or not we can make the goal remains to be seen.

Speaking of petty cash, I’ve noticed that the better we are at funding each of our envelopes: food, gas, clothes, school, hair care, car repair, essentials, and kids’ activities, the less we need money in the petty cash jar. A drawback of funding each of our envelopes, however, is that we have less money to send towards debt. I know that the reality is that we are actually accruing less debt too, because we aren’t having to charge essential purchases.

I have roughed up our May budget, for example, and I only have $1865 to send towards our credit card. Seeing that number was a little deflating. I really want to be able to send a minimum of $2000 a month towards our credit card debt. In that budget, I also put $50 into savings, paid $100 towards what we owe our kids, and filled our envelopes with $700 collectively.  That is $850 that could have gone towards debt, but if I did that, we would probably have accrued more debt paying for things that needed to be paid for.

I am trying to be more fiscally responsible, which means saving money for things we need to save money for so we don’t get caught unawares or unable to pay for things we need and paying off debt. I read blogs all the time that talk about how hard it is to save for multiple goals. Now, especially, I see what they mean. It’s hard to fund multiple goals. It would be much easier if we didn’t have debt! The goal here, is that by funding our envelopes, we will have to rely less on credit to get us through the month. Eventually, I would like to fund our envelopes at about twice the rate we are right now, but until we are out of credit card debt, we are unable to do that.