The balance between paying down debt and savings

[catherine]

You provide the landlord with a stable, clean tenant who is not hard on the place. That is worth something to him.

That is worth gold to landlords. Similarly my DS has been able to maintain a rent way below inflated Burlington housing prices for the same reason--his landlord over the years has either not raised his rent or just raised it nominally. He pays 975 for a cute one-bedroom just steps from Church Street, the heart of downtown..

[Tybee]

Oh, score!

[Tradd]

I agree! I watched the whole thing, minus the parts about children and pensions. I agree with Tybee, the question "how does debt make me feel" is key.

My issue is that the way it makes me feel and the way it makes DH feel are totally different. To try to get him to understand the impact debt is having on our quality of life (particularly mine, because I'm the one working to service it), I went onto Ramsey's free "EverydayDollar" site, where you can construct your budget in a very user-friendly way. I input the money we will be getting in in November, and I prefilled the fixed expenses for him, and I asked him to simply go in and fill in the discretionary expenses, matching the expenditures against the income.

Well, he came in whining that he in't understand it. "Why are things so hard?? What's wrong with paper and pencil??" I told him, of course paper and pencil are fine, but that means you have to constantly adjust manually which is a major pain. "I think we should do this together." he whined.

I specifically wanted him to take the first pass so that he couldn't "blame" me for restricting our spending. So HE could see that the incoming and outgoing aren't lining up. Especially as I am into my 70s, I'm darn lucky that I am still working, even though my income was down 40% this year.

I really want to channel Dave Ramsey right now, when he so cleverly dresses down clueless people. I want to tell DH to put on his big boy pants and grow up.

Anyway, mini-vent over--Tradd, thanks for that video. I'm going to check out other ones, and I'm going to ask DH to watch it. He might feel less threatened by this nice British woman than he would by a no-holds-barred Dave Ramsey.

Did you ask DH to watch Frugal Queen’s video yet?

[Tradd]

Decided to take my emergency fund down to $1K. Threw $800 additional at debt. When I started this thread, I thought I had $4L in savings as I was going off top of my head. It was really $2800.. I needed to get new tires for the Escape, so that was $1K right there. Down to $1800.

[catherine]

Did you ask DH to watch Frugal Queen’s video yet?

Not yet--we've been busy, but I will mention it today. I don't want to overwhelm him with financial stuff all at once--I might turn him off!

But, guess what? Inspired by your thread, over the last two days I have reduced my subscriptions and unneeded auto-pays by $162.49 per month! I still have one or two things I have to get rid of, so in all I'll save $200+. It's amazing how these small "hidden" expenses creep up!

[Tybee]

Wow, that is wonderful, Catherine, and thank you Tradd for the inspiration!!

[Tradd]

Catherine, that’s great to hear! Glad to have provided some inspiration!

Right now it appears I’m going to be saving more money by not diving at all until the spring. This is not by choice. There were apparently some divers who stirred up the bottom bad at the WI mine where I’ve cave dived in the past. So as a result, instructor is probably going to be restricting diving to classes only. After only diving there once all last winter I was hoping to get out there some this year, but oh, well.

[happystuff]

That's a nice savings, catherine! No subscriptions here, so nothing to cancel/save on. Oh, well.

[San Onofre Guy]

Tradd, I applaud you on your get out of debt push. You have made great progress. Don’t feel bad about not having a mortgage deduction, most people don’t due to the high personal exemption. Also the mortgage write off doesn’t make sense. Think about it, why spend $1 of interest to save twenty-five or thirty cents in taxes? Also a five year old car with 113,000 miles has a lot of life remaining. I know that you want Apple Play…buy a speaker for your phone. When you get an emergency fund set up, start putting $300 per month into a car fund for when you buy a newer car. Newer cars are very expensive versus maintenance on an older car. My two cents

[Tradd]

Tradd, I applaud you on your get out of debt push. You have made great progress. Don’t feel bad about not having a mortgage deduction, most people don’t due to the high personal exemption. Also the mortgage write off doesn’t make sense. Think about it, why spend $1 of interest to save twenty-five or thirty cents in taxes? Also a five year old car with 113,000 miles has a lot of life remaining. I know that you want Apple Play…buy a speaker for your phone. When you get an emergency fund set up, start putting $300 per month into a car fund for when you buy a newer car. Newer cars are very expensive versus maintenance on an older car. My two cents

My phone bluetooths into car stereo so I can play my music that way. Or plug it in via USB. I can so phone calls the same way.