S-T-U-P-I-D

    For dumb stupid reason, i attempted to talk to my spouse about money today...which of course led to an argument! He is in land development, so he gets paid per job that he does or a commission or a deal he closes (complicated).

Anyways, my brother in law calls (his brother) telling my husband about his new "steady" job and how great it is. Which of course..i am 100% jealous that he has a job (after 4 months of looking) that pays steady. I would kill for my husband to have a "steady" job. I just would love the security. We have two kids and no medical coverage on them. I tried to get us on healthy families, but 1. They closed new applications in July and 2. We make too much money apparently.

He has looked for jobs (they all end up being commission based...which i hate!)...and he gets them. Then he does it for a minute, but realizes he can't really work his Land development company and do the other jobs. So, those jobs go bye bye. Then i ask him about it and he says, "Land Development pays far more right now then working any of those other jobs" which honestly is true. But the money is not stable. One month he will get paid,then maybe we go one month without seeing a paycheck! This is such a nightmare. What am i supposed to do? H-E-L-P. I am so stressed because i don't know where we will be getting a paycheck next month, but he keeps saying "i'll have to do something drastic" what the hell does that mean? He says, "like go out and get a job?" ..isn't that what you have already and job? AHHHHHHH! So we are currently in opposite ends of the house. I hate talking about money and bills with him, just leads to a freakin fight! So now I need to add dealing with my flipin marriage on my never ending list of crap to fix.

H. E. L. P

Finally the check came in the mail today! Yeah. $4,500 to be exact. Rent can be paid…only officially 5 days late. I don’t think we have ever paid rent late in our lives. I have bills coming out of my ears. I hate checking the mail…who doesn’t want something from me? Comcast? Medical Bill? Student loan, take a number please.  Where do you start? Do you pay a little bit on each bill you have (We make good money, But we have way more bills), or do you pay of the small stuff first? Or maybe you pay off the big stuff or what you can and put the small stuff on the back burner? 

 Where I live they have a coupon magazine called “The Clipper”. I have always thrown it away. I have always wanted to cut coupons, but it truly does seem like an overwhelming job. Today when the clipper came in the mail, I actually looked at it. A couple of things I clipped out. Like one had a free dental exam for a child under 3. My son could use that for sure! The rest though were for eateries and bounce houses…which we won’t be going to.

I need to look at all the bills and get things in order. Even thinking about it I shudder. Usually it causes arguments with my husband and I, and tears, of course on my part, then the blame game takes place. We make a bunch of goals that we never follow through on. Then we make a budget that we never follow and never look at again.

Where should I start? I have absolutely no idea. Do I just start lugging through all the tons of mail covering the desk? Or make a budget first? Help…I am drowning in debt!

Overdrafts

Last week our joint checking account was -$562.00 (yes, negative), with our savings -$168.00. I literally scavenged in my house to find 4 dollars (all in change) so that we could put a smidgen of gas in the truck.

I work from home. My job is an online store and it does pretty well. Although we rely heavily on my husband's income, I floated us out last month financially...well sorta. The rent still has to be paid, and that is in my husband's hands. My husband owns his own land development company. He has certain land deals that are supposed to pay us at the beginning of each month, however, we have yet to receive payments  for the month of August. Which is how we pay our rent, vehicles and the big things.

Anyway, my husband wrote a check from one of his personal accounts ( that had very little money in it) and deposited it into our savings account (which had positive $1.48). He did this so he could pull out more instantly and put gas in the truck. We later found out that the check bounced, which was followed by a lovely overdraft charge of $33.00.

When I went to check the checking account, I was expecting it to be positive because I  transferred money from paypal to  my checking. It was still negative! I could not believe it. So, I finally figured out my online banking password and went online to see what the flip was going on with our checking account. I had $300.00 in over draft charges! FUDGE! Every time I went to the closest ATM machine by my house (which isn't my actual bank) they charged me, and of course because I didn't have money in my account, my bank slapped me another hot one with $33.00 each time. I had no idea. I was checking that account religiously praying that it would be positive, only to find out I was was making it more negative everytime I checked my balance.

Small lesson learned: Check my freakin balance at my actual bank and make sure I know my password for online banking so I can check it at home.

Are any of you battling debt? Have any of you overcome your debt? Leave a comment and let me know. Your comments are important to me. I am hoping to use them as some kind of guidance to slowly dig my family out of this mess.

My Debt List

Student Loan 1
Student Loan 2
Car Loan
Truck Loan

In Collections:

Phone bill
Dental bill
Medical bill 1
Medical bill 2
Medical bill 3

My Story

My husband and I were not "rich" but we had lots of money and managed it carelessly. My husband is a land developer and I am a SAHM WAHM (work at home mom). My husband used to have an office and a full staff that worked for him. Now, it is just him that works the company from an office we share together in our rental house. We did lots of things like go on vacations, cruises, eat out (all the time) buy expensive gifts for people. Then the housing market started spiraling down...and things got real interesting.

I would be lying through my teeth if i said it was the current economy that made us walk from our house (which went into foreclosure, and now someone else owns it), or is the reason now why we have more bills than we can pay. Put simply: We were living above our own means. Before the market fell apart and went to crap...we were already there.
Yes, at that time my husband was making great money, but we did not manage it good at all. We would take the money and go on vacation ( and pay for other people to join us) and then come back from vacation in a panic that we didn't have any money to pay out mortgage. We had no savings and most often our account was overdrawn. Our marriage (3.5 yrs at the time) was almost up in flames. We were arguing and playing the blame game like crazy. Pushing the fault on eachother, or the business or anyone and everyone else. The creditors would call day in and day out, I honestly had a fear of answering my phone.

We eventually walked from our house. We chose this because we needed to save our marriage more. We knew that walking away from the house, would completely ruin our credit. We also knew that walking away from the house would be a lifestyle changer. We knew that if we kept spending out of controll and arguing like we were we would probably divorce very soon.

Unfortunately, we didn't adjust to that new "lifestyle" changer very well. So we did what we do best, we spent, went on another cruise, vacationed, shopped. Paid bills late. We moved into a really nice rental home. Really nice. When we did the numbers late one night on the rent and the electric, utilities and water...the costs was more than what we were paying for our mortgage in the last house!

We needed to once again make a BIG change, because bills were being paid late, and we just knew we could not continue to pay as much as we were in rent. Thankfully, the house we were renting went into foreclosure, which allowed us to successfully get out of our contract and move into a affordable rental home. We currently only pay $1600 for rent (we were paying $2100 before in rent). In the last house we were in we never once made our rent late, but often enough we bounced checks, made late payments on bills and student loans.

Fast forward to now:
I work from my home to help make ends meet while taking care of our two children. I have to say, the best part about taking this "fall" was that it taught us how to communicate better. Although going over bills and finance is still a struggle, we really are trying. We really are trying to dig ourselves our of debt, but currently we only make enough to cover our monthlies and a little extra. We want to start paying down all the debt we have...we just don't know how to exactly go about getting that done...successfully. We have made budget sheets to no avail, tried to do the "cash" only..which worked for 3 days. We have so many bills, that it is so overwhelming on how and where to start. I dread going to the mailbox, because there is always a letter for something i owe, that i don't have the money to pay for.

I am hoping to get some good pointers, tips, help and guidance from people who are knowledgeable about finance, or who have found successful ways that they balance their budget. Maybe this information will help others and not only me.