Debt Free or Bust

September 2008 Debt Report

Debt balances:

• Dentist (crown): $325
• Attorney: $449
• IRS: $2,752.40
  
• Chase HELOC: $4,887.64
• CFCU Visa: $4,915.38
• Capital One HELOC: $21,549.57

First mortgage balance: $116,860

Debt Balance excluding co-signed student loans and first mortgage: $34,879

Total debt including first mortgage, excluding student loans: $151,739

Student Loans:

• Co-signed student loans, approximate balance: $45,238 (need a complete audit on these accounts; not sure this balance is correct or even close)

Possible total balance including 1st mortgage: $196,997

Discussion

Before I get into Hurricane Gustav, I proposed a payment schedule to the IRS of $85/month and it was accepted. Payments are due on the 12th of each month until the balance is paid in full. I plan to pay more than that, but I proposed the least I thought they would accept that would pay off the balance within 36 months.

Hurricane Gustav, although it didn’t make more than a footnote in the national news, devastated the Baton Rouge area. Thank God our house wasn’t damaged because my hurricane deductible is $7600. We were without power for 10 days, and we finally got cable and internet service back yesterday, 27 days after the storm. I was able to intermittently access the internet from hot spots around town 12 days after the storm until our internet service was restored. Prior to that many businesses weren’t open and hot spots didn’t exist.

My income was interrupted extremely significantly this month and it will be a little lower than normal again for the month of October. August tutoring is typically slow as students return to school and begin to decide which subjects trouble them and which don’t. Tutoring was greatly interrupted for over half of September because of school closures due to Gustav and Ike. School is significantly behind schedule. The tutoring ramp-up I usually see in September won’t happen until October and my tutoring income won’t be back to normal until at least November.

My website consulting income was also significantly interrupted because of lack of power and internet access. As soon as we had internet access again, I got busy and have one client needing a website and have begun to work on it. I stayed in contact with a colleague who is helping to funnel me people who need websites built so I can make some money quickly.

My passive online income was higher than I expected. I didn’t expect more than a few dollars here and there. Though it isn’t much, surprisingly I received $102.66 from various sales and advertising on my blogs and other websites. That was totally passive income. I haven’t made any new blog posts that weren’t already scheduled to publish since August and I haven’t done any blog marketing since August either. I haven’t been able to keep up with email let alone get more done on a very part-time online income source. It’s nice to have enough from these sources to pay for a tank of gas and a week’s worth of groceries.

I have been working on several post drafts to publish when access became available, but most of those still need to be completed or edited. I’ll get to those when I have the time.

I did not pay my dentist or lawyer anything this month, and my second mortgage payments are late. I actually haven’t made those payments yet. The only payments I made this month were the utilities and first mortgage. I filled the car gas tank once, and we ate whatever FEMA had the National Guard distributing when our other food ran out. MREs now come in a pretty wide variety and have lots of different things in them to satisfy most anyone. They have water-activated heaters in them so your main dish is hot.

We qualified for emergency food stamps this month and I got them so I could buy food once the canned food and MREs we had been living on ran out. We may qualify for food stamps again in October, but I hope not. If I can get significant website work and more students quickly we will have enough money for the necessities.

I haven’t done anything in the yard business because people who really need help cleaning up their yards can’t afford to pay. I helped neighbors in need contact faith-based groups who are doing free clean-up and I did some free cleaning up, too. Most who really needed help needed cutting crews with chain saws and that’s beyond my equipment and abilities.

It was extremely hot without air conditioning and with no place to cool off after a hard day’s work outside, I had to drastically reduce what I was doing. I spent most of my time on my own yard. Where others had trees come down, whether through their houses or just in their yards, my entire yard was covered with very large to small fallen limbs. Some were stuck in the ground and others were too heavy to drag out front without cutting them up. I’m still in awe that our roof and house were spared. My neighborhood looked like a war zone there was so much destruction, but we were somehow left untouched. I don’t have a chain saw and I’m not that big, so most chain saws are too much for me to handle safely. I use a hand tree saw. It takes some time and a lot of sweat, but I get the job done safely. It’s good exercise, too, and I dropped 5 pounds in 10 days. When it’s that hot, you just don’t feel like eating very much.

As far as direct hurricane losses, we didn’t lose anything except some items in the freezer that we couldn’t eat before they spoiled. I had just a little too much left in the freezers to consume within 72 hours after they thawed. I spent most of this summer emptying the freezers down to what we use weekly so our losses were minimal compared to Katrina.

Right now I am contemplating how we can be so blessed and so broke at the same time. I truly feel deeply thankful that we had no damage. It amazes me how I feel after going through all this just 3 years after Katrina and Rita. Even though things were much worse I feel less out of control and I have both a short-term and long-term game plan to fully recover from this storm as quickly as possible.

Gustav was far worse than any storm Baton Rouge has experienced in over 50 years. Those who were around in 1965 for Betsy say Gustav was worse. There is a lot more destruction. Gustav was a category 2 storm when it made landfall. We all fear what will happen when a storm on the same paths as the storms we’ve experienced this decade make landfall as category 4 or 5 storms. Andrew in 1992 was a category 4 storm when it made landfall along the coast of Louisiana and it did some major damage, but nothing like Gustav.  Andrew was a category 5 storm when it hit the Miami, Florida area. For more on my hurricane thoughts I hope you will visit my Hurricane Katrina blog. I’ve started a new category for Gustav. The link is in the sidebar on this blog.

We’ve really been out of touch on the news without TV, so we missed the initial stories about the economic crisis. The whole economic crisis thing isn’t really affecting us because we live on cash, but it will affect us if cash availability from the credit market crash trickles down this far. I’ll write a separate post on that topic because it’s an important one and understanding what’s happening isn’t as simple as taxpayers are being sucked into bailing out Wall Street. That isn’t what’s happening at all.

That’s our status this month. I’m working hard on getting back to normal and hope that will happen really soon.

Technorati Tags: debt report, hurricane gustav, income crisis, irs deal, september 2008

If you enjoyed this post, please subscribe to my RSS feed!

September 28th, 2008 Posted by joubess | Debt Reports | 3 comments