One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

I am sick of the constant “one step forward, two steps back” that I feel our financial journey has become.

If it’s not one thing, it’s always something else. Just this past Christmas season, I was paid back some money I was owed and instead of being able to put the money back where it belonged, I had to use it for this or that. For example, we took a long weekend trip to visit family in Nevada and only spent money on gas: all our meals were cooked at home; but on our next-to-last day, our neighbor called to tell us that the fire alarms were going off in our house. Once we were home, we had to replace all the fire alarms in our house, to the tune of $125. I do think that was money well spent, I just hate that it happened when it did. I hate feeling like we can’t get ahead.

There is always a silver lining to the story above: we did have the money to buy new smoke alarms and we didn’t have to charge them. But, the money, which was earmarked for something else, didn’t get to go where we wanted it to.

We also started building up our savings account again, but we overspent on Christmas and have to transfer some money out of savings to pay our credit card so that we don’t increase our debt. And it is worth it to not increase our debt. In fact, out debt repayment was very minimal this month because of Christmas. Next year will be different because we are already starting our “Christmas fund” for next year.

Another example of one step forward, two steps back: The Husband’s car needs new tires and it will cost about $400. We don’t have enough money in our car repair envelope yet so we are going to charge the difference. The Husband had overtime on his last paycheck so the extra money more than covers the extra for the tires, but I’m sad we couldn’t send all the extra money towards debt. Again, I’m happy that we had a “plan” to pay the difference since we didn’t have enough money on hand, but I just wish Murphy would stop popping up all the time.

I feel like every time we start to make real progress on our debt, Murphy is right there to get his share. If it’s not one thing it’s another: kids sports or activities, cars, washing machines, etc. It’s always something. But I’m not going to let him get me down. I’m going to keep making progress on our debt and meet my financial goals!

Sorry this is just a whiny post but I’m so sick of the debt cycle and we are struggling so hard to break it. Now that I wrote it down, I got it out of my system!