The power of fives

I am on my own for budgeting for a while. Marty is working ungodly hours (13+ hours a day, 6-7 days a week) and will be for a while (3+ months) so I am on my own. It just doesn't seem fair to spend a few hours of his only day off working on a budget when I am more than capable of doing it myself.

So needless to say, I have been thinking about budgeting and debt repayment a lot lately.

Somehow, we added more debt. Well, I know how it happened, but I am not proud of it. I wish I could say it was for something fun like a trip or laptop. I wish I could say it was because of the move. It wasn't. It was because we made stupid decisions and stopped paying attention. But I can tell you this - I am done beating myself up over debt and money. D-O-N-E. So where does that leave us?

Five years. I have decided to start thinking in chunks of five years, and nothing more. If I continue to freak about the fact that we are 37 and 35 and have no retirement savings, I will kill myself. (Not suicide... I will probably have a heart attack or stroke. The chances of me living past age 42 are slim enough as it is, but that is a whole other blog post.) If I continue to compare myself to those Dave Ramsey callers who paid off a million dollars of debt in three months, I will go mad.

So, I am going to come up with end of the year goals, yearly goals and a five year goal.

The good thing about five year chunks is that Ethan is 13, so five years from now, when he is 18, things will change dramatically. :o( That will be the perfect time to reevaluate and come up with our next five year plan.

So for the sake of easy math, you have $25,000 in debt that you are trying to pay off. (Which, holy shit, please don't let me have that much. I am almost afraid to add up all the carnage.) That comes out to $5k a year (duh!) and only $417 a month. If you are paid bi-weekly, that is only $208.50 a pay check. That is less than my bi-weekly snowball amount. Woo hoo! But what if it weren't?

How many of us can't cut $200 from our bi-weekly budget? Fifty dollars off of the food budget, $25 off of the gas budget, $25 from your blow money budget... See, you are already half way there. Cut the cable and go with a cheaper cell phone plan (or better yet - get a pay as you go cell and use it only for emergencies) and you have the other $200.

But don't forget - While we are snowballing our debt we are still making our regular monthly payments. So in the grand scheme of things, my five year plan won't take five years after all. But if it does end up taking that long, I am ok with it.

Once I figure out my talents, I am going to try to turn them in to cash. In this most horrid of economic times, though, I am not sure that relying on selling my services is going to work out. Thankfully, anything I make is icing on the debt snowball cake and not our main income. Then I would have a heart attack.

Picture from flickr.