January's Money Update

Let's look at a couple of snap shots of how my money is doing here at the end of January. If you look down on the left hand side, you will see the badges for the No Credit Needed Network and for Networth IQ.


These are both interesting this month. My debt pay down chart is showing that I have gone backwards! My last chart on Jan. 1, 2008 showed that I had paid off 11.29 % of $26,915. Today it shows that I have paid off 2.86 % of that $26,915! What happened?

If you've been reading along, you know that I was able to get a new consolidation loan at 4% less than I was paying. Using this money I paid off our Visa card and our Costco American Express card.

We aren't big Costco shoppers (we find that we spend too much when we shop there and other stores are much more convenient to us), so we decided to cancel our membership. Both my wife and I agreed that the folks at Costco where very good. We spoke to 3 people about our desire to cancel our membership, each one made a soft retention bid. As soon as we made it clear we were firm in our desire, they were very pleasant and agreeable to cancelling our membership. The only reason we talked to 3 people was because we had to go to a cashier to cash our rebate cheque and when we got back to membership services we ended up speaking to a different person. They even rebated our membership fee that was charged in October. If things change we will be quite happy to go back to Costco and would recommend them.

Canceling the Costco membership automatically canceled the Costco Amex card, but that was a plus because that means we can't run up any debt on it now. We are hanging onto the Visa for travel, travel emergencies and online purchases, and it had the lower credit limit.

Of course we also paid off the old TD Consolidation Loan.

Now for the funny stuff. I think that this might be somewhat heretical to the personal finance community, but I used some of the loan money to set up my $1,000 mini emergency fund and set up a cushion on the chequing account. I just feel more comfortable with the EF set up and ready to go. From here we will just apply ourselves to the debt repayment without the worry about something happening before we got the EF set up.

This of course means that we ended up back tracking on a lot of the last three and a half months of debt payment. We are NOT further in debt than we started though. We owed $26,915 when we started tracking this and we owe $26,144 now.

On the other hand, our networth is looking really good. We ended November 2008 at $19,187. December ended at $18,018. January number is $15,057! That means that we improved our net worth by $ 1,169 in December, and the kicked the crap out of that by improving our net worth by $ 2961 in January!!!

I'm not completely sure how this happened. My RRSP mutual fund lost some but my regular contributions and match from work actually put me up by approximately $150. My Rogers stocks ended up being worth $600 more than I though. Oh, and I found $100 American left over from last summers vacation. This still means we saved $ 2100 in January...well, after the rent cheque today that will be $1,300, but I am very happy with the situation.

I had been thinking about getting a part time job to speed up paying things off, but that is going to be put off for 6 -7 months. My wife is making an amateur movie and it seems that I'm moving from behind the camera gofer to actor, so I won't be able to commit the time to an extra job. Instead I will be trying to make extra money with overtime at work and Ebaying. I really have to get moving on selling stuff on ebay.

Thanks to everyone for following along with my money story. If you like what you read, please list me in you blogroll. Thanks to JW who listed me on his blogroll at NeedToBeDebtFree!

I've been busy tweaking the budget.

It's been a few (6) days since I last posted. Thats been a combination of being busy, but mostly it has been a lack of focus. Instead of focusing on this blog, I have been concentrating on redoing my budget spreadsheet for a biweekly schedule instead of a monthly schedule. I ended up going back and transferring all of the 2008 transactions into the new, biweekly form and that entailed lots of fiddly squinting and typing.

It also meant a bit of staring at the old spreadsheet and trying to figure out how I wanted things to work. On the old spreadsheet that I found at FinanceandFat, it had a column for your planned budget, 5 weekly columns for actual expenditures over the month, a total expenditure column and a final column to show the difference between the planned and the actual. It's a very nice monthly budget spreadsheet and I recommend it to those of you using a monthly sheet.

The problem was I just hated the fiddly part weeks. Two weeks a month I was sticking extra days into the week which usually meant going over that weeks budgeted amount for things like food and gas. With a biweekly budget I would be spreading those two extra monthly pay cheques over the whole year effectively. I think that will let me put some of that money biweekly towards operational savings and debt repayment. Instead of two lump payments, I will be having interest work for me more effectively by paying biweekly.

For the biweekly budget, I wasn't really sure how to set it up. I didn't want to just have 26 columns for the 26 pay periods in the year. With a biweekly budget, I would be saving smaller sums to build up to the monthly bills, so I would have to show savings amounts as well as payment out. I didn't want to be moving money in and out of the savings account all the time either. Currently, I'm trying a spreadsheet that has a planned, credit, debit and balance column for each pay period. It means that it's quite wide, but because I can fit three pay periods on the screen at a time, I don't actually have to scroll left and right during a session of date entry.

So I be evaluating my design for the next while and probably tweaking it some more. I'm always interested in better ways of doing things though, so if anyone has a recommendation for handling a biweekly budget, please let me know!

And really, my Christmas excess, soon now!

We Paid Off the TD Loan

This morning before going to work I checked the bank accounts and the cheque from the PCF loan, that I've talked about before, had finally cleared in the TD chequing account. So after work we dropped dropped by the TD Bank and paid the remaining balance of the consolidation loan off. I'm not getting too wildly excited about this because we've just exchanged a debt at one bank with a debt at another. However, the new loan is at 7.5%, 3.5% less than the old loan. This means that every payment will be paying off more principle. And that's a good thing. Hmm...well it's actually worth about $1.72 per day difference in the interest on $20,000.00.

I been working out the details on changing from monthly budgeting to biweekly budgeting. For us it's just going to make everything easier. The budget will be the same for each two week period. To me the fiddly part weeks in a month alway seemed to make budgeting more difficult, did you budget extra for them or did you just try to stretch last weeks money to cover an extra four days?

Tomorrow my pay should be direct deposited into the PCF chequing account. Mrs. B's was deposited today. We both are paid biweekly, her on Thursdays and I on Fridays. So the first biweekly budget period will start tomorrow. The biggest single item is rent at 21.5%. The biggest aggregate is debt repayment with 3 items at 13.2%, 11.8% and 6.5% totaling 31.6%.

The biweekly budget lets me slip in a little extra because the two extra monthly pays are divvied up amongst biweekly items. This means that two biweekly periods are about 8% less that a monthly period. This works as long as there is enough float in the account so you don't go into the hole. I'm keeping a $1,000 cushion in the chequing account so I think that I'll be ok. This 8% is allowing me to budget for a couple of things like replacement glasses and vacation. My current glasses (invisible bifocals) were $500 and my employer only has $200 coverage for optical. Maybe if I don't need to replace them I'll be able to save up for laser eye surgery.

The other day, over at Loonies and Sense, the author posted about chequing account cushions as well.


Tune in tomorrow for my story about my Christmas excesses!

New Rogers Share Certificates Arrive

Yep, they finally showed up. I had sent the share certificate for my 12 shares of Rogers Wireless Communication; Class B shares in a while back to get them exchanged for the RCI:b shares that they were swapped for.

When I opened up the envelope, I beheld two share certificates for 21 shares each. That means that the 2006 stock split doubled my holdings. Along with the certificates, the envelope also included a $23.32 cheque for past dividends and interest. Now if I can just figure out if Computershare will let me do a DRIP. At the quarterly dividends of $10.50 I'll get a whole new share each year. OOOoooohhhhhh. What the hell. It's going to be a couple of years before we get all the unsecured debt paid off and save for the downpayment.

I certainly like what I read in Derek Fosters book "The Lazy Investor". I'm thinking that while we are paying off the debt I can pick up individual shares in the companies I want to hold long term, set up the dividend reinvestment and stock purchase plans. Then in a few years I can begin to sock money into the skeleton I've prepared.

Well, lots more to learn! Good night.

My Very Best Saving Tip

NCN who posts at No Credit Needed is rerunning a page where he is asking personal finance bloggers to share their very best money saving tip. Click here to read what people have contributed.

My very best money saving tip is "Start Now". Stop planning to sell some stuff on Ebay soon. Spend half and hour and put your first item up today. Don't have a budget? Pull out your bank statements and start seeing how you spent your money in the last 4 months.

This is my biggest challenge. Action. For years, money and retirement where something that I would worry about later. Years passed and I am just now starting to clear away debt so I can save for the future. My wife and I have been married for 13 years and one of the most important things that she wants is her own home. We are no closer now than we were when we got married. Sure, I have all kinds of excuses, but when it comes down to it, only actions count.

Waiting for a solution to appear magically, is living in a fairy tale.

It won't happen.

Taking your first step to take responsibility and take action to solve your problems is the solution. Then take another step, and then another. They don't necessarily get easier, but the first one is the hardest. If you fall down, you get up and take that step again. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Good luck!

Personal Finance and Emotions

I just read an interesting post by Tim over at Canadian Dream. It rang very true to me, because I had recently posted about the disconnect between what I felt and what I thought I should be feeling. He makes the point that we make financial decisions based on emotion and justify them to ourselves afterwards. I recommend reading the post. When you're making money decisions, it's important to understand what is influencing those decisions. It's not an incredibly deep thought, but I thought that I would share it.

Dow Jones Has Lost 9.2% Since Jan. 1

I read this article from the New York Times today that stated that the Dow Jones had lost 9.2% of it's value since the first of January. That's quite a hit and I'm sure that a lot of investors are screaming. On the other hand I'm just wishing that my debts were paid off so I could be buying stocks at these prices. I've just started learning about the market, but this seems to really be the time to scoop up some bargains.

So are any of you taking advantage of this down turn? If not, can you tell me why?

Visitors!

I'd like to thank everyone who is coming over to the site from NCN's www.ncnnetwork.com site. I'm glad to see you folks being interested in my efforts to pay off my debts. Any comments or suggestions are appreciated, and good luck in your own efforts to get out of debt!

Personal Thoughts

Today was a weird day. Yesterday was a major step in our goals of getting out of debt, but today I just wasn't feeling as up as I thought I would be. Maybe it was work, or maybe I've got a bug.

Huh.

Regardless. Debt repayment will continue. Next Friday is payday and we will pay off a little more of our debt. Only two outstanding debts now, the remainder of the TD line of credit and the PCF loan. We will be doing the minimum on the PCF loan until we hammer the TD LOC out of existence

We can do this!.

More PCF Loan Stuff and Stray Thoughts

On Tuesday we signed the loan paperwork and yesterday the money was in the account. It's always seems a little daunting to suddenly see an extra $20,000 in your bank. If only we didn't have to worry about paying it back.

I put through payments for the outstanding balances on the Amex and on the Visa cards. There will probably be interest charges still showing up on next months bills.

I'm wondering about the American Express card. It's a Costco membership card we got when we joined Costco. It doesn't have a fee and does pay out something like a 2% or 2.5% cash bonus once a year. I don't think we need more than one credit card though. The Visa rate is 19.99% (can you tell that I missed a couple of payments?), but the Amex rate is 26.9%!

The big thing is that we really don't shop at Costco much. I bought our better computer there last year before Christmas and Mrs. Brian bought her last pair of glasses there this summer. I think that their prices on glasses are really good. and both our vision plans only cover the first $200 for vision care. However, I really don't like shopping for groceries there because it's so hard to get out without paying $200! You save so much that it kills you! So Costco does charge a membership fee, even if the Amex is free.

I think that I will cancel the Amex and the Costco membership when we pay off the outstanding interest on the card. Any thoughts from anyone reading this?

As well as making online payments on the two credit cards, I dropped by the TD bank and deposited a cheque for $17,000 to or TD chequing account. Apparently, it won't clear until the 25th! Ouch! When it does clear we'll pay of the old consolidation loan and throw the rest at the line of credit.

We both put requests through our workplaces to change our direct deposits over to the PCF accounts as well as changing the car insurance P.A.C. over. I have to get the info for each of our life insurance policies to change their P.A.C.'s as well.

While I was at the TD I closed out our Companion Savings account. It's sat empty for more years than I care to remember, always waiting for that saving program we were going to start. Last year I started putting $40 a pay in to save for something (can't remember what now), but we never got too far with it. We'd get $100 or $200 in there and would end up using it to pay bills with.

Finally, back in October I started using it for our Freedom Account. I heard about the concept on one of the person finance blogs I was reading. The concept is promoted by Mary Hunt who wrote Debt Proof Living. Essentially, you divide any annual expenses by 12 and deposit that much each month. We had Car Maintenance, CAA, Driver Licenses, Club Memberships, pre payment for vacation. Rental Insurance at the start and have since added Cat Expenses, Health, Deductables and "the Movie Project". When you need to pay for whatever, you've already saved the money for it. Therefore less stress and worry about paying for those bills you weren't expecting. That's a bit of an oxymoron, but you understand what I mean. There's probably some reoccurring bill I've forgotten, but I set up a miscellaneous category for those!

Anyhow, I cleared out the money and closed the account. When the teller asked why I wanted to close the account I told him; "I'm moving my account to President's Choice". He didn't really seem to care.

We Signed the Paperwork

We went in after work and signed the loan paperwork. Tomorrow we should have $20,000.00 to pay off the credit cards and the old consolidation loan. At 7.5% interest we are going to be hitting more principle with each payment.

Of course we're not any further out of debt, but the sides of the hole aren't as steep as they were before!

Ellen Roseman

Saturday night I was doing some browsing, (yeah, I'm a party kind of guy! :-) ), and I came across Ellen Roseman's blog, Ellen Roseman On Your Side; Straight talk on personal finance and consumer issues. She is a columnist for the Toronto Star who writes two columns; On Your Side and Money 911.

They are all great reading and if you are concerned about the lack of customer service that we Canadians are getting from big business I would recommend that you read her stuff. Bell, Rogers, Future Shop, the stories from customers are pretty horrifying. She also writes on a number of financial topics as well. The debate (in the comments between a larger mutual fund broker and and index fund proponent where fun to read.

Definitely recommended reading!

Site Changes

I want to thank everyone for their patience, as I slowly play with the site. When I set the site up on Blogger they only provided two column templates. I really wanted a three column template. Now I really don't know anything about html or css, but by using google I was able to hack together an answer. Unfortunately, the colour wasn't right on the new sidebar. Tonight I finally printed off the XML code for the page and figured out how to set the colours the way I wanted them to be. I still have a few more things to do; I want to divide the left sidebar into a top and bottom like the right, but that won't be happening tonight. Maybe later this week.

Debt Update

This Thursday and Friday was payday for my wife and I. We paid $441.00 on our debts, or 1.64%. That means our total amount paid off is at 11.29%! Check out the No Credit Needed Network badge down on the left. It will show the ongoing status of our debt payoff!

Rogers Stocks

I came across the fact recently that Rogers Communications was raising their dividends to $1 a share yesterday. This is interesting because I own some Rogers shares from back in 2000 when I worked there. At the time, the shares I got were Rogers Wireless shares and the share certificate has been stuffed into a file folder ever since.

When I decided to get out of debt, I tried to find out how much they worth, in order to pay off some debt with them. I couldn't find a record of RWI as a stock. A little more research turned up the fact that the parent company had bought out each RWI share for 1.75 RCI shares. This meant that my 12 shares where now 21 shares.

Next, I wondered how much I might expect in the past 7 years of dividends. So I turned to google. I found some info about something else besides dividends. According to one site, there have been 2 stock splits of RCI stock. A 3:2 split in2004 and a 2:1 split in 2007. Now my google-fu isn't as good as some and I have not been able to confirm the 2004 split.

If both are valid I should have something like 63 shares. If only the 2007 happened, I will have 42 shares. Either way they are worth more that I expected.

As far as past dividends go, they were only paying out 10 cents a year back in the early 2000's so I'm not holding my breath.

Loan Update

Well, this is just a quick note before I head out. I spoke to a CSR at PCF and I've been approved for a $20,000 loan @ 7.5%. They'll call as soon as the documents arrive at the store kiosk. (For folks from the states, President's Choice Financial only locations are in store kiosks in a large chain of Canadian grocery stores)


Yeah, $20,000 not $25,000. It's a bit of a pain but it still gets most of the job done.

I found something out today which surprised me, but I'll have to talk about that later.

Until then!

2008 Financial Resolution

So this is the resolution I made over at Cash Money Life's blog back in November. He was running a contest with an IPod as the prize.

_______________________________________

By Brian on Nov 29, 2007

Not too surprisingly, my goals and plans ring true with many other posters.

Currently, I owe $525.00 to Wells Fargo @ 0% for a couch my wife and I bought. We love the couch, but really didn’t need to replace the old one yet. There’s 4 months left before the 0% interest goes to 28.90 %.

I am currently overdrawn on my chequing account to the tune of $950. An account with a major Canadian bank that charges $13.95 a month in fees plus interest on the overdraft.

I have 2 credit cards with a total balance of $2860.00. A line of credit with a balance of $7,900.00 and a consolidation loan with a balance of $13,500 owing.

Step 1: Stopping buying things, I want as opposed to things I need.

Step 2: Analyze my income versus my expenses. Create a budget. After minimum payments on credit debt and living expenses I have $270 to use to pay down debt.

Step 3: Pay off the Wells Fargo debt. This will take two payments and will be retired by the end of January.

Step 4: Apply that $270 to my over draft until I have built up the chequing account to a positive balance of $1000.00 to act as my emergency fund. That should be in August of 2008.

Step 5: Sell the shares I bought as part of an employee purchase plan and put the money towards our emergency fund. This should put $800 -$900 towards the emergency fund.

Step 6: Work all the overtime I can get at work and put everything over the regular pay towards the emergency fund. Due to OT availability this might be $100 - $300 dollars extra a month. Assume $150.
Steps 5 and 6 should mean that the emergency fund will be fully funded by the end of March.

Step 7: Get down to ebaying that stuff sitting in the closet.

Step 8: When the emergency fund is fully funded, close the chequing account and move the money to the no fee President’s Choice bank account that I have set up.

Step 9: Apply the $270 plus all OT moneys towards the credit card debt. Hopefully the cc’s will be paid off by September or October.

Step 10: Start applying the $270 plus the OT $ plus the $110 minimum cc payments towards the Line of Credit. This should put me close to having the Line of Credit half paid off at the end of 2008.

In 2009, continue paying off the Line of Credit and then pay off the Consolidation Loan.

Thanks for the opportunity to make my 2008 financial resolution. I certainly hope that I win the Ipod because I won’t be buying one in 2008!

___________________________________________________

Well, I didn't win the IPod, but I did get one as a Christmas bonus at work!

A month and a half later and somethings have changed, the Wells Fargo is payed off and we're consolidating the other debts but the general plan is on track! Next step, build up that Mini Emergency Fund.

PCF Frustrations

I accept that an internet bank will most likely be a little more difficult to deal with. To save $156 a year I'm willing to deal with a little inconvenience. But sometimes....

So I called PCF back tonight like I was asked, to confirm the change on the loan to a variable rate. It turns out that we had to go through the whole loan application thing again. The CSR has everything in front of him from the first time, but we have to go over everything all over again.

It's all worth it for 7.5%, it's all worth it for 7.5 %.

So I have to call back tomorrow night, again. Or maybe Thursday...

Sigh.

Oh yeah, the super just dropped our rent deposit interest cheque through the door. Now do I snowball it on the Amex, or do I save it and apply it to the new loan (once we get it)?

DVD's, Shelves and Pantries

Last year I came across a Lifehacker link to this series of pictures on Flickr. A fellow called Barelyfitz, had saved a lot of space for his DVD collection by storing each DVD in an individual slip cover. He also cut the front and back cover of the DVD wrap to be able to ID the DVD's without the colourful print jobs.

The wife and I thought it was a good idea and got around to starting our project last night. However, we first went through our DVD collection and pruned it. We ended up pulling 56 DVD's that we decided that we didn't want to keep and after work we took them to The Beat Goes On and sold them. We ended getting $121.00 for them which we thought wasn't too bad.

On the drive home I realized that we should of looked into selling them on Ebay, we might of made more money. The store paid us $7 for the copy of Beastmaster, so it would of definitely made more on Ebay!

We live in a 2 bedroom apartment and space is at a premium. We have some space intensive hobbies as well. One of the things that has really surprised us since we started living on a budget and being more organized with our shopping is that we are running out of cupboard space in the kitchen!

O.K. It's not a big kitchen, but right now there's three jars of peanut butter, 3 jars of spaghetti sauce and a can of creamed corn all sitting on the counter because we can't find a place to cram it into. So we had a plan. Once we repackaged the DVD's, (which looks like it will fill about 3 shoeboxes now), we would use the spot by the kitchen door that currently has 4 DVD shelves, to hold a stand alone pantry.

After selling the DVD's we headed over to Canadian Tire and picked up the pantry and pocketed the extra $30. We'll add that to the money we've saved to buy an new dresser for the bedroom when we go to Ikea on Saturday. IKEEEEEAAAAaaaaaa. A little piece at a time we're getting rid of the old crap in the bedroom.

I know that some people would say that we shouldn't be spending money on stuff like furniture when we could be paying down debt, but we are working for a balance that leaves us happy with our surroundings as well as our finances. If we hadn't sold the DVD's to pay for the pantry, the Ikea money would have paid for it and the spending at Ikea wouldn't of happened until we saved up the difference. We would have still ended up going to Ikea, because our daughter needs a ride so she can buy a bed for our granddaughter.

As for the DVD shelves (from Ikea), we'll give one to our daughter and we have friends who would like to buy a couple from us.

It's all working out quite well!

PCF Loan Update

So I called President's Choice Financial tonight. We were approved pending us sending in our income verification. We'll be faxing that off tomorrow.

$25,000.00 at 9.5% fixed rate over 60 months. I checked about the rate, because Larmer said he expected a rate drop by the end of the month and that jibed with some of the other stuff I've heard . So I asked about variable rates and the CSR said that it shouldn't be a problem to change the loan to a variable rate. The variable rate is Prime + 1.5 % or 7.5% right now. Much better than the 11% I'm paying on the current consolidation loan and unbelievably better than the 25.99% on the Amex card.

We'll call back to confirm tomorrow night and then we'll have to go into a kiosk to sign the paperwork.

I can't wait to walk into the TD Canada Trust with the cheque book!

Welcome Back

I'd like to welcome everyone back, or welcome you to my blog if you haven't been here before. As this is post number 2, the second option seems to be much more likely.

Last month, I got a Christmas bonus at work of $300 and was quite excited. That combined with a Survivor pool at work that won me $50 meant that in December we were able to pay off the last $335 of the Wells Fargo furniture loan for the couch we bought back in April of 2007. The loan was 0% for the first year and then was going to go up to 28.9% if it wasn't all paid off in time. Of course, all the interest over the whole year would of been due.

My wife and I were really pleased to get that out of the way. Now, we are looking at the rest of our debts and deciding on what to snowball next. We have a consolidation loan with $13,000.00 at 11%, a line of credit at about $8,000.00, an American Express card with approximately $2,000.00 at 25.99%, a Visa card with $900.00 at 19.75%. On top of that we haven't saved up our $1,000.00 Emergency Fund yet.

We wanted to get that Wells Fargo debt gone before the $164.66+ of virtual interest became real interest. Now that it's out of the way, we are ready to tackle the E.F. and the other debts. Because we have a wide range of debts and interest rates we contacted President's Choice Financial to see about consolidating everything. If they agree it means that everything will be at either 8.5 or 8.75 %. That means knocking about three months off of our estimated payment schedule. That means saving $3,600.00 of interest. Holy crap, I'm just floored by that. If they ok us, we will be going in to T.D. Canada Trust to pay off the loan, the line of credit and the visa.

Now, if they want to keep our business they will have to give us a better rate of interest than PCF and I want no fees on our chequing account. I don't expect them to give that to us.

So Monday night I'll let people know if we got the loan.

Welcome and an Introduction

I'd like to say hello to anyone who reads this blog. Thanks for stopping by! As you might of guessed, my name is Brian and this blog is about my money.

About three months ago I decided to do something about my personal finances. For close to 30 years, I've lived from paycheque to paycheque. Sometimes I got by o.k., but most of the time I scraped by. There were occasional bounced cheques, missed payments, warning letters, dunning letters, even at one point a garnishee.

The reason for all of these problems? I always thought that it was because I didn't make enough money. As well, I never REALLY wanted to look closely enough to actually DEAL with my money issues.


Temporary. short term, stop gap solutions.until I would drift into the next problem. At one point in time I had about three months of bills piled up. Still sealed in the envelopes! (The secret is Magical Thinking. If I don't open/see the problem, it doesn't really exist!) This all meant a fair bit of stress at times, wondering which bill I wouldn't pay this month, so I could pay the rest.

Over the last few years, I started getting better with my money (well less stupid). I stopped writing cheques. With online banking up here in Canada, the only thing I couldn't pay through my online banking was the rent, and my wife and I started to use money order's to pay the rent. No more bounced cheques. Of course we paid extra for that. We got better about making sure we had the rent money before the first of the month. No more explaining to the super why we were going to be late with the rent.

We still got socked around. Car repairs. Man, I hate car repairs. It sucks to have to have your dad front you the money to pay for an unexpected car repair. Slowly, we started making better choices. Two years ago, we started talking about how expensive the two bedroom townhouse was to rent, plus utilities. We got a consolidation loan from the bank and piled all of our credit card debt into one mess. In four years we would be free and clear.

We started to look around and in June 2006 we moved into a two bedroom apartment with heat and hydro inclusive. Now we were cooking with gas! We were going to get somewhere... yeah, right, deeper in debt.

We had available cash and credit. After coming back from our vacation in August, we were worse off than we were the summer before. More credit card debt piled on top of the line of credit, on top of the consolidation loan.

Through September I began to do some thinking, and some reading. I started to follow some of the personal finance blogs here on the net. Started to track how we were spending our money. Read more pf blogs, Read a few books,

And made the decision. Once, and for all. I was going to deal with my money and my money issues. I was going to take control. November was really an empowering month. We had a budget and we stuck to it. We stopped using the credit cards. We started using cash for the grocery and discretionary money. We added up our debts and looked them in the face. We added up our income. We made a plan. Our income was greater that our needs, we had $200 of wriggle room and we are going to use that to leverage ourselves out of debt!

First we need to save up our $1000 Emergency Fund. We are saving into our Freedom Fund to take care of irregular expenses and we are attacking our debt paycheque to paycheque!

We are going to make it!

So please read along, as I share our journey. Thanks for coming along.