Debt Free or Bust

Am I Committed?

I’ve had a lot of comments on the My Total Money Makeover (MyTMMO) message boards and on this blog that ask me why I’m not taking personal responsibility for my debt situation. I’ve been more than a little defensive about it.

I’m taking responsibility or I’d have already gone bankrupt

I am taking full responsibility for my debt, and I’m living with the harassing phone calls, nasty letters, and law suits. I’m the one who got into debt over my head and I’m the one who is dealing with it. I’ve been working as much as I can and throwing money at the problem as fast as I can for the last 7 months and it’s not making much of a dent in my overall debt situation. The amount of money I can throw at the problem now isn’t anywhere near sufficient. Most people can make headway paying $1000/mo on their debts. That’s just a drop in the bucket in my current situation.

I’ve been feeling like I’m hitting my head against a brick wall trying to knock it down, and not only is the wall not falling, my head is figuratively bloody and it hurts, and the emotional toll is getting too high. I’m not getting traction. I’m getting more depressed.

As I’ve thought about this over and over every month since I started my debt snowball in April 2007, I know only one thing that will change my situation at the pace it needs changing. Making a hell of a lot more money than I’m making now. How am I going to make a lot more money? I’m working on that as hard and as fast as I can. But I’m feeling lost and misguided. I’m listening to other people that I don’t know with agendas of their own - Dave Ramsey, his fans and the MyTMMO members.

Peer pressure is just that - pressure from peers who want you to do things their way instead of listening and then making your own decisions based on all the information you have. I love what Dave Ramsey does and I think he has some of the best ideas out there right now. But the fans and members are way too into peer pressure. Some people need that to get them off the fence and doing the right things to win with money. I don’t. I’ve always been very self-motivated and independent, fiercely independent to a fault at times.

I’m also stubborn. Tell me to do something and I might not just to spite you. Tell me not to do something and I might for the same reason. Fortunately, I’ve never been very self-destructive about my rebellious behavior. Now that I’m grown up I mostly ignore the gauntlets that are thrown down in front of me. But sometimes it’s still a strong urge I have to wrestle with, especially when someone I don’t know preaches at me. I’m likely to get angry now and tell them where they can stick their opinion.

I listen to my close friends and family who are a lot more helpful and compassionate (thanks, y’all; I love you!). Getting a chance to spend some time reconnecting and talking with them recently has helped me a great deal. They know me and they know what I need a lot better than strangers on a member forum website.

But it comes down to me. The buck stops here. I have to find my way through this mess. I have to find a new career path. I have to make the final decisions about what will and won’t be done in my house with my money. I know me and my situation better than anyone. I can listen to the advice of others, but I’ve got to make up my own mind and make my own decisions, whether it’s popular with the fans or not. And it’s so not popular right now. But I no longer care. I know what I’ve got to do first.

First Duty

My first duty is to find a new career. I don’t need just another job; I need a new career path that pays well. I need that career to be early in the day so I’m still free for tutoring in the afternoons and evenings (because I love it and tutoring pays very well).

Future career options that I’ve thought of so far are:

• tutoring full-time (would solve a lot)
• teaching math and science full-time in the public school system
• teaching math and science full-time at the local community college
• teaching math and science to other home-schooled children
• writing full-time
• working for a local non-profit organization (I have no idea which one)

When the urge hits me I write down more ideas for new careers. I keep a running brainstorming list just like I do for article ideas.

I’m still waiting on my copy of 48 Days to the Work You Love by Dan Miller. I love Amazon free shipping because it’s free. I hate Amazon free shipping because it takes so damn long for stuff to get here. I’m chomping at the bit to get going on a new career path. I’m researching the things I’ve thought of that I might want to do, but I feel like something is missing from the search. I feel like I’ve left out an important step in finding the best fit for my next career.

I’m not just going to jump into another career without proper research because I’ll stay out of misplaced loyalty. I’ve figured out I’ve got to be selfish about this because I won’t come up with something I really, truly love and that is right for me if I’m not. I’ll go off and do something because I’m supposed to get a job and I won’t quit when the time comes to do what I should really be doing.

What about my business?

I’ll be taking my business down to extremely part-time. I’ll only run it when someone calls for an appointment. Otherwise, I’m cutting the business’s costs to the bone, dropping all memberships and advertising as they expire this year, and keeping my registered investment adviser license. The only thing I’ll have to do this year to keep that is sit for and pass the NASD Series 65 exam. The RIA license is only $150/year. Any income I make from the business will be applied to the business’s debts, which I’m personally responsible for anyway. I can also continue to write off business debt interest on my taxes.

Blogging

I get a lot of flack for this, but I’m also going to continue writing on my blogs in my spare time and learning from Blog Mastermind. I’m going to write anyway so I may as well make some money at it. Blogging is like journaling used to be for me. I write to figure things out and to sort through my emotions. It’s one of the two creative things I do and I have to have a creative outlet. I’ll be a nut-case if I don’t have some motivating form of creative outlet. Making plastic key chains just isn’t creative enough.

Blogging fits the 80/20 rule of reward/effort. If you can put 20% of your time and effort into something that will yield an 80% reward, it’s definitely worth that time and effort. My biggest rewards for blogging are not monetary, but let’s look at it from a monetary viewpoint for just a moment. Even if my very part-time writing only brings in a few hundred dollars a month, that’s at least a minimum hourly wage with no attached costs, like uniforms or gas to drive to and from work or babysitting. At 2 hours per day 5 days per week with 4.3333 weeks in a month on average, that’s 43.33 hours a month. If I bring in just $300 that’s $6.92/hr. My blogging financial goal over the next 6-12 months is to earn substantially more than that working on my blogs the same two hours a day. If my income grows to $500 or $1000 per month, my blogging hourly wage goes up to $11.54 - $23.08. If it doesn’t bring in much money, I’ll still be blogging.

People who consistently write on their blogs, monetize them, and market them during that 10 hours per week grow their blogging income over time. It may never turn into a full-time income, but blogging isn’t about money for me. A blogging income is lagniappe.

Committed to which plan?

I get a whole lot of flack about not being committed to the plan, meaning The Total Money Makeover plan. I’m committed to the plan, but I’ve also got more important issues to sort through before the plan can work for me the way it’s supposed to. The plan assumes you have a full-time income that’s substantial enough to pay your debts off rapidly if you cut your budget dramatically. My income isn’t high enough, and adding part-time jobs and what-not just isn’t solving my debt problem as I discussed above. My budget has already been cut about as far as I can cut it.

I don’t fit the typical TMMO profile of someone who lives beyond their means on a consistent basis. I never bought the American debt lie. Having lived debt-free most of my life, I’m not the type of person who lives outside her means. I’ve always spent far less than I’ve made, bought good used cars and drove them a long time, and I don’t spend much money on clothes and shoes. We have what we need. The place where I’ve overspent to some extent has been on my son because I had the cash to buy him things after all the bills were paid and all the retirement and savings deposits had been made.

I had no debt except my first mortgage on my house until I opened my business. That’s when I did stupid with zeros on the end. I didn’t have the right advice. I picked the wrong people to advise me on what I should do and now I’m in a deep whole.

What this epiphany means for me is I have to step back from The Total Money Makeover and solve my career crisis first. I have to commit to finding my new career and do whatever it takes to get it going as soon as possible.

That doesn’t mean I’m stopping budgeting. The zero-balance budget has helped me immensely and I’ll continue to use it the rest of my life. I’ll also continue my debt snowball, but not by working lots of extra jobs to make a couple of hundred dollars to put toward the debt right now. I need that time and energy to go into my career, and my creditors are just going to have to wait. They’ve waited this long. I don’t believe a few more months will make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things.

First things have to come first. Allowing others with their own agendas that I don’t know and don’t know me to influence my priorities was weighing me down and keeping me stuck. I don’t feel stuck now.

Once I’m back on track with my new career I will be in a position to re-commit to The Total Money Makeover and do whatever it takes to get out of debt.

Technorati Tags: 48 days to the work you love, Career, crisis, Dan Miller, Dave Ramsey, debt, priorities, total money makeover

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January 6th, 2008 Posted by joubess | Career | 2 comments