Finally, Another Post

Lucky for you, it's a rainy day!

While I may not be writing on here as often as I had initially set out to do, I am still able to report a level of progress in my debt repayment. When the seasons take a change for the better, it gets difficult for me to sit down in front of a computer and write something meaningful for my readers when I could be sitting outside in the sun and enjoying the weather. Fortunately for you guys, it's a rainy day so I am much more inclined to write something today!

There is a lot that has been going on in the past few months that I feel like I should be sharing with everyone so I hope you have a bit of time to read another long blog entry. The last time I wrote on here, I had just finished paying of my 2nd source of debt - my line of credit. I'm really starting to notice how good it feels to only have two debtors left to pay. Imagine if all of a sudden you didn't have a rent or mortgage payment, that's what it has been like for me! My debts are going to disappear rapidly since I am no longer spreading all of my payments across 4 different debts. The best part is, I have tackled my highest interest (or most expensive) debt first which is really freeing up more money for me to put toward the principal of my other debts.

Where I am beginning to struggle however, is that I am more inclined to spend money on myself to go out, eat dinners, have drinks, do trips, etc. and I feel that I am becoming less focussed on what it is that I set out to achieve which was to not have to worry about money and whether or not I was paying all my bills on time. Lately, I am making my budget so tight that I don't have a lot of flexibility if something comes up that I need at the last minute, such as contact lens solution, massage therapy, a birthday present, and so on, so now I get down to $8 left in my chequing account and I end up taking money out of my savings to pay for drinks at the bar or something that I used to easily be able to say no to. Now it's fair to say that none of those things I mentioned really are 'needs' because I could simply wear my glasses and lower my spending when it comes to gifts and save the money, but because I have progressed so quickly with my debt repayment, I have found that I am telling myself the story that it's ok to spoil myself with lavish trips to Montreal, or expensive meals out, $80 at the bar, and so on.  Yes, I deserve a break; yes, I am doing incredibly well with my payments; but yet I still feel stuck because of my debt. There is nothing I want more than to be able to say that I am debt free, so I guess that's where I need to check in and remind myself that this is something important for me to do.

Can you picture me and Gail hanging out at the office?
*Dreams*

Speaking of overspending, I had an amazing time in Montreal with my boyfriend, but we definitely spent way too much money for only one weekend! I finally got all the bills in for the car rental, hotel, and all that other stuff and the numbers are nuts! I'm sure that we spent well over $1,000 on 2 days of celebrating. It was worth every penny, but now I have less than $100 in my savings account! I completely understand why Gail talks about the importance of a savings account and I am happy that I didn't have to use credit to pay for everything, but it is certainly disappointing when I look at my horrendous balance in savings.

Even with dismal savings, I will continue to try to put enough away to get my savings back up for a trip to Saskatoon to see my family sometime this year, but it could be a challenge since my sister and her boyfriend are coming for a visit in less than 2 weeks and I will be on another spending binge. This is the problem I have; when something fun is coming up, I really neglect savings in favour of having fun. So we'll see how I fare when they're in town. If I can stay focussed and try to make sure we eat the majority of our meals  here at home, I think we'll be just fine. I'm just really excited to see her again and finally get a chance to show her around town.

Now I have some more news that may affect my savings and debt repayment! My employment status is changing. I am currently acting in a job where I get paid a little more than I used to, but now that is changing in July when the person I am replacing comes back. This means that I am going to go back to my old job (most likely).  It's kind of a good thing in the sense that I will get to go back and work with the people that I enjoy working with, but I will lose some pay and may end up bored out of my mind. But what is more exciting is that I found a second job working at the yoga studio that I volunteer at! I will be a front desk person a couple times a month and I will still get all the free yoga I want while getting put on the payroll! I am super pumped that I will now have another source of money and I will be able to put all that into my savings account. I can now save for vacations and other fun things that I really want to do!

Lots of hearts for Kelly Clarkson! ♥♥

Ok, I just listened to a little Kelly Clarkson to spark a bit of "I'm down on myself but shouldn't be because I am doing pretty darn awesome", so with all that being said, I am still doing incredibly well with my debt repayment. I'm over 60% paid off now and if I can somehow manage to pay $1,500 every month from this point forward, I will be debt free in about 9 months!! Can you believe this? If any of you have been doing the math along the way with my progression, that means that I will have paid almost $40,000 worth of debt off (on my own) in 2 years and 3 months! I cannot believe that I have been able to progress this quickly through this process.

I really want to reemphasise to all my readers that debt keeps you limited. When you can't get out of it, you can get really stressed and frustrated which can leave you feeling helpless. By taking control of your situation, everything from your health to your relationships can be improve by removing the pressure that debt adds. Financial planning can set you up for a life of freedom to do all the things that you want to do in the most optimal way. If you have a good plan, then you don't have to stress about what you are going to do in the future. The whole point of this blog is to tell you about how I am freeing myself from the burden of debt. In the future I may want to move to another apartment or even another city, I might want to buy a home or a car (I'm still trying to figure out the "what next") but as long as I have debt, it makes it difficult to imagine what the next chapter will be.

At this point, I am proud of my accomplishments but I still am dying to meet Gail Vaz-Oxlade and I'm not talking about shaking her hand at a book signing, I'm talking about actually sitting down and having coffee to really and truly thank her for helping me get my life back. One day I hope that I can be that inspiration for someone else in this kind of situation.

To Halifax, With Love

John and Kate minus all the effing children!

I’m not gonna lie to you, like a drunk sorority girl at a fraternity party, I was out of control (with my spending this week). On Wednesday, I headed east to the Halifax (aka Hali, or HFX) for a business trip, followed by a weekend of local beer and seafood – and it was freaking delicious.  Hate to say it, but I strayed far from the budget in a few ways so I think it would be best to go over the reasons for my financial fudge-up in order for you to learn from my mistakes.

 

The beginning of my financial demise is that I had been depriving myself of shopping and spending on me for far too long, which leads me to my first point – everyone breaks at one point or another. Like a fat kid deprived of candy for a few hours, as soon as I saw that sweet temptation, I filled my hands with the sweet sweet satisfaction of shopping. Can you believe that it has been since the end of October since I bought myself ANY clothing? Now, those of you who know me, know that I am the kind of guy who has a lot of clothes; perhaps too many. I’ve taken the time to count up some of the numbers just so you can understand how unnecessary it is for me to go shopping. I have:

20 Dress shirts

18 pairs of pants

20 pairs of shorts (including gym shorts)

9 scarves

15 jackets

14 non dressy button-up shirts

5 sport jackets

6 hoodies (or bunnyhugs for all you Saskatchewanians)

80 shirts (sweaters and cardigans included)

Oodles of underpants

Stacks of socks

Piles of Pajamas

Bundles of belts

Too many ties

And the list goes on

So as you can see, I really don’t need to buy anything else for myself as far as clothing is concerned, but I have been depriving myself of the rush of how good it feels to put on and buy a new piece of clothing. This is where I have run into a problem. For 6 months, I have been away from shopping malls and clothing stores for month because I know that if I remove the temptation, I won’t be tempted, however by not ever treating myself, when the temptation is there, I am shopping as if everything is 90% off!

The second factor in my overspending evaluation was being on travel status with work. Admittedly, I am new to this whole travelling with an expense account process and since I was allowed almost $90 per day (whoo!) to spend on meals and incidentals compared to my usual $120 for an entire week of living, so I quickly got used to spending like one of those insane couponers on TLC. I was right back into eating out, drinking too much, and buying any odd thing that I “needed” because I knew it was covered (very much like those crazy couponing ba$tards). This spendy spenderson mentality seemed to stay with me after I was off my work travel status and into my personal weekend of fun! I kept spending as if it was all covered by some magic money wand that would automagically fill my wallet with cash. The problem was that every morning when I opened my wallet, that $100, $200, or even $300 that I had in it, disappeared. Had my money turned into food, and my wallet Rita MacNeil’s mouth?

Donairs in Halifax are EPIC!

Alcohol is my worst friend when it comes to making logical spending decisions and believe you-me I drank a lot more of it than I usually do while I was in Halifax! With every great meal, you need to have a great glass of wine (I tell myself that it brings out the flavour). See Alcohol is happy to point out that the server is hot and they deserve a 20% tip for being hot, or that cab driver let you bring a leaking donair into the back of his cab, so he deserves a $10 bill for a $5 cab fare, or sure I can spend more money on booze, that’s why I took it out of my bank account, right? Oh Al, you get me every time!

So what does that translate into dollar amounts John? Well, let’s see, without factoring in my meals and incidentals:

Wednesday:

$50 for swim trunks from American Apparel

Fancy new clothes from H&M ($36 for the shirt and cardi)

Did you know that employees at the Halifax American Apparel are actually helpful and not pretentious d-bags? I didn’t know that was possible. Usually you get eye rolls for asking for something on the top shelf. And why swim trunks you ask, well I wanted to go swimming in my hotel, and of course when I did, I lost a contact lens and there were annoying children in the pool who never actually swam, but preferred to throw a ball around my head while I was trying to relax in the hot tub.

$20 for a case of beer (to share with my friend, and an attempt at trying to get people to want to hang out with me in my hotel room (I ended up drinking 4 on my own – sad face).

Friday (gotta get down on Friday since everyone is looking forward to the weekend):

$244 at H&M. Now to my credit I made out very well; with this money I bought 1 pair of pants, 3 pairs of shorts, 1 cardigan, 4 t-shirts, and 15 pairs of socks.

$50 on supper – but it was the best duck confit and pizza I can remember having in the past forever.

My awesome owl art print!!! 

$30 to see Hey Rosetta!

I was so drunk I didn’t realize that they were on stage and then ended up meeting the bass player at another bar afterward – so ridiculous.

$75 on beers throughout the night

$5 for the best donair I ever ate

$10 for a drunk taxi ride home

Saturday:

$40 for yummy in my tummy food at the Market.

$15 for an art print of a kicka$$ owl!

$15 for more beers to go with my amazing supper made by the loveliest hostess ever - Kate.

For a grand total of: $554 on a really fun trip. Obviously I need to learn to get a little better with my money when I’m travelling or only take out a limited amount of cash when I’m hammered, but honestly, I feel like I needed to reward myself for all the hard work I have been doing. It doesn’t look like I am going to be getting wooden Catan soon, but I have learned a valuable lesson for when I travel – make a plan and stick to it! If you’re ever planning on going to Halifax, I highly recommend going – the people, scenery, and food are all marvelous!

Vacation or Staycation?

Public Speaking is not for Everyone

First off, I apologize for the lateness of this entry. For some stupid reason I decided to sit through 3 painful hours of James Franco trying to be funny at the Academy Awards. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a great actor, but his hosting was as awkward and uncomfortable as hearing your in-laws doing it in the room next to you. The second thing I should apologize for is this entry in general – it’s kind of all over the place and to me seems like a total pile de merde, but maybe it’s just me. I’ve hit a rut today and just feel like a total $het-bag. Whether is was the incredibly huge dump of snow that we had today, or looking through my brother and sister-in-law’s awesome pictures from their trip to Mexico, the daily frustrations I sometimes feel at work, the fact that we don’t get another holiday until the end of April, or maybe just a case of the Mondays, I’m beginning to crave some real time off. I haven’t had a paid vacation in seven, yes seven, years and let me tell you, it sucks the biggest balls you’ve ever seen. So what do you do when you’re like me and vacations are completely paid for out of your own pocket? You improvise and save like a gangsta!

Look at this stupid phoque.

Have you ever heard the term “Staycation” before? If you have, then you know it’s a combination of vacationing and staying local for your holidays. This is a great way for you to seriously cut back on your annual vacation bill, while still getting to enjoy some much deserved time off. In the past, I have used my credit card to foot the bill for all of my vacation time over the past 7 years. Yes, this is the reason why I was covered in over $14,000 worth of credit card $hit-debt. I used my card to cover my flights, hotel bills, and worst (or maybe best) of all, liquor bills. We all have the intention of paying back our credit card bills, but when we’re out on a holiday, it’s so easy to get into that mentality of “Phoque it! I’m on vacation and I deserve this.” Then we get the bill and $hit our pants wondering how to pay it all back. I’m not going to argue that we are all worth splurging on, especially while lying on a beach soaking up the sunburn and guzzling several dozen beers. The big catch though is that you need to seriously plan ahead save up the money for a trip first, and then budget what you want to spend while you’re on vacation. 

Now, back to the magic of staycations. Most cities that we live in (or nearby) have all sorts of festivals, attractions, parks, pools, hotels, and so on that are within easy access. The key having an amazing staycation is to get creative and use these resources to find fun things to do with your loved ones on the cheap. For example, there might be a local festival that you can take the kids to on a certain day where kids can go for free. If you bring them along with some lunches, you can save tons on money and we all know kids to care one bit about whether they have restaurant food or a delicious peanut butter sandwich. After that, stay for a night in a local hotel when it’s on sale and if there’s a waterslide for the kids to go on, they will have a great time. If you’re looking for a nice romantic night with your snugglebum, plan a weekend at a friend’s cottage or plan to try something new like kayaking together while grandma watches the little rug rats.  Kids won’t care if they’re in Mexico or in Taco Time, as long as they’re having fun! 

Everyone deserves a break which is why KitKat was invented. Although Kitkats were made for those quick breaks where you supposedly only eat one of the wafers and you eat is slow and savor it, but in reality we all inhale them in under a minute. Not much of a break at all. Mind you, if you can substitute taking a holiday with eating a KitKat, then you are way ahead of me in the thriftyness game and you can stop reading the blog right here.  So staycations are totally not for you and you have to go on a vacation instead, this is the part of the blog for you. My brother is getting married in August, which means that I have not one, but two trips to take this year. The first is a trip to Las Vegas for his stag party and the second is his wedding! My brother asked me to be in his wedding party so I feel incredibly obligated to go to his stag party. Yes, I get the irony of a man who is trying to save his money and pay off his debt and going to Vegas. This week I was researching flights to Las Vegas and I was amazed at all the different tools out there to help me find an affordable flight without having to go through a travel agency.

Since I am such a huge nerd that know how to use those internets for good AND evil, I started with ‘the Google’ to do some incredibly mind-blowing research on flights by typing “(Name of your city) to Las Vegas” and I was directed to a pile of websites for flights. The key thing to know is that you need to search lots of different websites and don’t just look at one thinking that it has the best price like you’re some kind of person with a horseshoe up their derriere. Imagine shopping for flights as if you were standing in a grocery store and comparing toilet paper (or as my Dad called it, “a$$ wipe”) – would you just buy the first one that you see and not look at the price, or would you check to see if one was on sale?  When I started to look for legitimate travel websites, I recalled reading another person’s blog about travelling on a dime and I saw that someone had mentioned flightnetwork.com, so I checked out that one first. The results were plentiful, but they didn’t include the totals for the flights with tax. At first I had thought I could go with their website and only pay $319 for a return flight; which would have been $hit-my-pants-incredible! However, upon closer inspection, when you go to book the flight you find that they add in all the taxes and fees at the end right before you’re about to book which is something I’ve always had issues with. Really, why not tell us how much the flight will be right from the beginning? It’s not like we’re shopping for the Airport Improvement Fee separately! Oh no! I can’t afford to go through Toronto, their airport improvement fee is $3 more than Halifax! Puh-lease.

To my own surprise, I ended up going with Expedia to book my flights. They put the estimated grand total right in the costs when you’re booking so there are no surprises at the end. The overall cost of the flights was actually cheaper than Flightnetwork and they were the exact same flights. Once I was able to see which flights were on sale, I went to the airlines’ websites to make sure I wasn’t having the wool pulled over my eyes and sure enough, the quotes on Expedia were actually cheaper than the airlines actual listed prices.  Now was the difficult part for me – having to use my credit card. I had to find it first since I threw it into my closet to prevent me from using it! Once I found it and wiped the dust off of it, I was ready to go. I have worked so hard to not use my credit card over the past 5 months and so far this was the only time I had to – so that felt pretty darn good. $535 (taxes and fees in) I had my flight to Las Vegas booked! This is really exciting for me because I have never been to Sin City and I think that I am overdue to have a vacation that isn’t revolving around a winter holiday!  

There are some key things to remember when you are flying anywhere:

1. Book your flights early to get the best deals (3 months in advance of your flight will usually get you the best deal);
2. Fly midweek for cheaper flights (Tuesday to Thursday);
3. Compare as many airlines as you can by using different travel websites;
4. Sign up for airline newsletters to get advance information about seat sales and other deals;
5. Fly to locations in the off season for awesome savings; and
6. Marry someone who is a pilot or airline employee to get free flights

Spandex makes everything hilarious.

Finding a place to stay is the next biggest expense on your trip and sometimes more expensive than your flight. Lucky for me, my hotel is paid for in Vegas because of how incredibly sexy I look in spandex. When planning a vacation, plan to go to places where you know someone and you can crash with them, or just like with the flights, you can do a hotel search. Sometimes the flight sites will have links to partner hotels that will offer you a deal and even include a ride to the hotel from the airport. A great site to find hotels is Hotels.com. They have a great detailed breakdown of all the hotels from bed and breakfast locations to 5 star hotels. For those of you who are more risk-taking, try out hotwire.com (it will even do a comparison to Hotels.com). This site will randomly place you in a hotel at an incredibly discounted rate in the general area you want to be, but you might not end up somewhere you want to be. Most of the time though, I end up in an awesome hotel and if you’re only going there for a vacation anyway, it doesn’t really matter where you sleep because you will be out and about enjoying the sights anyway! Those of you looking for the really cheap rates, there are hostels all over the world that can save you a ton of cash, or you can even try couchsurfing.org (but this could be a little sketchy).

Ok, so you’re all set to go on your awesome trip and come back to post all the pictures of you online in the same pose in different locations around the world. This is where it’s crucial: save some money! Try to have a vacation where you do not need to pull out your credit to cover the costs and start putting a couple hundred dollars a month toward your expenses in the destination you are going to. Figure out the average cost of food for where you will be and make sure to set a cap on your spending for each day, and you can come back from your holiday without the stress of wondering how many months it will take you to pay for your two week vacay! Budgets work just as well in real life as they do in vacation life. Look for ways to save and you will have more money to put towards amazing vacations in the future.

Thank you for all the emails and kudos that you send me. You inspire me more than I inspire you and it helps me every day to see this goal out to the bitter end.

XO

John