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Knyteguy posted:If it's anywhere near as entertaining as some of the ones I've seen in here then I know we've hosed up. Don't worry -- buying a new $400 console while in that kind of debt is definitely entertaining. An 18% rate on an auto loan is murderous. You might as well have put it on a credit card. That's over $200 in interest you're paying every month. If I were you, I'd try and get a $1000 emergency fund saved up and then sink everything else into the debt, highest APR to lowest. And definitely look into refinancing. Once you get the bleeding stabilized you can start small by contributing to your 401k up to the match, but as others have said, no investment is going to reliably beat the return you'd get by putting it toward that car loan.
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Nov 20, 2013 22:36
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 16:36 |
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Knyteguy posted:We have around $2000 worth of free cash this pay cycle, not last paycheck. Another way to put that is "living paycheck to paycheck." You should not have to budget per paycheck, and if you're doing that you're missing the point of YNAB entirely. Good news: if that $2000 becomes your emergency fund/buffer in your checking account, you can stop paying overdraft fees and stop worrying about when money comes out for individual bills, and focus on the bigger picture.
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Nov 24, 2013 08:33
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Knyteguy posted:This right here is definitely what I have to work on. I was one of those people who saw "extra" money in the account (I wouldn't have quoted that before) and just blew right through it like it's going out of style. I'm done with that behavior. In business terms you've been treating your budget as a cash flow statement instead of what it should be: an income statement. I'm struggling to translate that, but cash flow is just making sure you keep the bank balance positive. You can fudge that with credit and timing your bill payments. Income, on the other hand, is about making sure you're earning more than you spend. In the long run it's much more important. Budgeting by month instead of by paycheck will be a huge help here. Try to set static amounts. Don't budget $100 for pets because "we need supplies." Go back a few months, figure out how much you spend per month, and put that amount in your budget every month. Same for food. Put a reasonable amount of "fun money" in there each month for you and your wife, and be accountable for hitting that number. To use the prepayment of auto insurance example, you wouldn't add $600 to your budget once every 6 months, you'd add $100 a month. At month six when it's due, the money will be there to pay it if you're sticking to your budget. You will eventually not have to worry about your checking account balance at all. Budgets should have two columns: estimated and actual. At the end of the month you go back and compare how you did vs how you planned, and you look for ways to improve. e: spending cash $0, discretionary $50, stuff we missed or forgot $30? Those are all the same thing. KS fucked around with this message at 23:23 on Nov 25, 2013 |
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Nov 25, 2013 23:15
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Knyteguy posted:Thanks for the input. I think we're going to stick with the YNAB method right now. I use YNAB too. Did you go through their training stuff? The biggest single thing is making purchasing decisions based on budget instead of bank balance. See the sushi example in rule one. You're definitely supposed to be splitting big bills into monthly (or per paycheck) amounts. I pretty much (unknowingly) quoted their rule two example about the auto insurance. It applies to any major occasional expense that you can project and estimate. Like a PS4  Knyteguy posted:Anyway I'm terrible about arguing semantics and I agree with you. For big purchases in the future I want to give an earnest try to save monthly. I think my mind is still all messed up from being raised poor or something. My parents went through bankruptcy twice before my mid teens, and my mother has blown through $500,000 and a free house, and still manages to have $30,000 in just credit card debt (no car payments at least). Being near poverty line for the first 3 years of my marriage didn't help either. I'm like the marshmallow experiment guy. Yeah, that's a brutal start to financial education. As she gets older you're going to get a nice first hand look at what happens if you don't control spending and it's not pretty. Good luck on breaking the cycle. KS fucked around with this message at 04:36 on Nov 26, 2013 |
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Nov 26, 2013 04:21
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These are very good for $40. Just look at those 1500 reviews! The $7 paring knives from the same company aren't bad either. Knife sets are really the mark of a cook that doesn't know better, or someone who went overboard on their wedding registry. You just need a few: a good chef's knife, a paring knife, and something serrated for bread. Add something for meat and fish if you cook it a bunch. If you need steak knives for the table, maybe those sets are a better buy, but otherwise I'd avoid 'em.
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Jan 30, 2014 08:06
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 16:36 |
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Did you check if you were eligible for the Sunday Ticket streaming thing? I ask because I am not, which is too bad. It looks like they're only targeting apartment buildings and certain areas, probably because they're less likely to be allowed to put up satellite antennas. Punished because I live in a SFH 
KS fucked around with this message at 00:47 on Jul 17, 2014 |
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Jul 17, 2014 00:43
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