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Knyteguy posted:Let me ask you guys this for some perspective. What would a successful month look like to you? What would a successful thread look like to you this time around? 1. Work out your priorities and get them in a realistic order. Buying a house, for example, is not going to be a realistic priority. An example of what realistic priorities might look like: - stabilize your living situation - get rid of all consumer debt - build emergency fund - max out retirement contributions - save a deposit for the house 2. Come up with a concrete plan that tackles those priorities one by one, in order of importance. Stabilizing your living situation might mean getting an apartment, or committing to the illegal living situation, or getting a new job. You need to work out which one based on probability and your values. 3. Worry less about the miniscule categories of your budget and focus more on impulse control. Make it a rule that you need to sleep on all purchases for a week before you make it. This will really force you to practice conscious spending and impulse control. 4. Successful thread when you get to the end of your priority list and have to make a new one. On the living situation thing, I think you could justify either course of action. There are different risks either way; pick the one that's going to make significant positive behavioral change easier. For what it's worth I would get the apartment. Living in an RV on the road is a big adventure; living in an RV in someone else's backyard is stressful. Even (and sometimes especially) if it's family. You'll need to make some big behavioral changes and it's easier to do that if you're under less stress.
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Jul 4, 2019 08:40
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Bobbie Wickham posted:I'm not just hand-wringing and pleading for someone to Please Think of the Children, but Mary, Mother of God, THINK OF THE CHILD I know. That's why I said if I were him, I'd get the apartment. But that's based on my values and priorities and I'm just a random internet stranger. Knyteguy posted:I run a Plex/htpc/rom&emulator server in my rv believe it or not). It came with a domain so I just tucked it under business. I... What? I also run a Plex home server and it does not come with a monthly recurring cost other than electricity. My Rhythmic Crotch posted:- I would probably lump vaping, "stuff forgot to budget", discretionary, alcohol, etc into one big ole category. The point being you should really understand, and be comfortable with, exactly how much money you're spending on stuff that isn't going to help your financial situation. This is a very good thing to do. Your budget should be set up so that you can tell at a glance what is non-discretionary vs discretionary. Each of these might have both fixed components (eg rent is a fixed non-discretionary, your cloud subscriptions are fixed discretionary) vs variable component (eg groceries is a variable non-discretionary while alcohol is a variable discretionary). Contributions to savings, debt repayment (including extra credit repayments) should be treated as fixed non-discretionary. That is, you pay them first and you never touch money that's earmarked for those purposes and especially not in favor of something that's discretionary. That means your priority of conscious spending becomes: 1. Fixed non-discretionary 2. Variable non-discretionary 3. All other discretionary - what you then spend here depends on you, because at the end of the day, everything in here is not a necessity
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Jul 4, 2019 21:58
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Knyteguy posted:- Sell my laptop. I'm no longer using it for work. Spectre x360 https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=spectre+x360&_sacat=0&LH_TitleDesc=0&rt=nc&LH_ItemCondition=3000 $300-$500 ?? Deciding to sell all this stuff is a really great step forward. Don't stress too much about the price, just get some good pics and throw it up, and you can always gradually bring the price down over time if you don't get many inquiries at first. I think you said you've still got loads more stuff in storage? If so, keep chipping away at it. Stuff lying around in a storage cage is basically dead money that keeps losing value the longer it stays in storage. Liquidate what you can and throw it all against the debt. Chances are if it's been in storage for this long, you don't really need it.
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Aug 23, 2019 08:30
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KG, please reread these two posts again and respond to them. They are Good Posts and you have avoided them:Haifisch posted:Wasting my time being semi-nice, but: April posted:Also, on re-reading this, look at the paragraph I bolded. HAVING A HOUSE IS NOT ON THAT LIST AT ALL. You want intangible things, but keep convincing yourself that buying a tangible thing will create or accelerate your attainment of those intangibles. Stop it. Also: Knyteguy posted:Why don't you tell me why you decided to buy a house and how far $40,000 in a renovation will go? I'm not acting like I know the answers to this stuff, even if I watch some of those house flipping shows. We bought a house knowing that it was going to be a complete money sink and did not look at it as an asset whatsoever (because it isn't, it doesn't generate money, it drains money). We bought it with the acknowledgement that it is entirely a "want", not a "need", and with enough cash in the bank to put 20% down plus closing costs without tapping into emergency fund. We are in the middle of the renovation process. $40000 is going to cover all of the professional design fees plus professional reports required by council plus other certification fees and council fees and maybe the builder's preliminary costs of setting up and packing up on the site. All the actual material costs plus labor of construction plus builder's profit margin will be on top of that. $40000 is not a lot of money when you're talking property and renovations.
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Jun 16, 2020 04:58
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Knyteguy posted:Well part of that is me trying to learn Pocketsmith. I just don't understand the drat software. I put auto paydown into a category and it somehow acts like because the payment is technically income towards the truck, that we're actually not spending that money. It's a loan - obviously that's not available anymore to budget. I did it step-by-step according to their guide and the money was still there leftover. If you have PocketSmith questions, post in the PocketSmith thread, which I monitor from time to time: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3913229&pagenumber=1&perpage=40 It sounds like to me that you haven't got something configured in a way that makes sense with what you're trying to achieve. Knyteguy posted:So what I did was redo the budget into YNAB since I'm super comfortable with it: You are putting the cart before the horse here. Don't start thinking about moving until you've got a solid 3 months of sticking to your budget and reflexively checking it any time you want to spend money on anything.
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Jul 5, 2020 01:04
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