Career | Debt Free or Bust

Debt Report Feb 2008

Debts Paid in Full Report:

Debts paid in full: 5
Amount paid in full: $2,659

Status Report:

February 2008 payments: $360.86
Total amount of payments made to date: $6,890
Debts left to pay off: 12
Next debt in line: at&t advertising and publishing: $429.53

Balance Report:

Current Debt Balance: $165,905
Balance change since last month: -$5,037 (increase)
Balance change since starting the plan (April 2007 plus the principal on new debts that have come up since $156,869): -$9,036 (increase)

I checked all my math and the above numbers are correct. I’ll have to go back and correct my past numbers. They aren’t correct. This is what happens when things change nearly every month; changing interest rates, changing fees, sale of debts to other collectors, you name it.

Now that my business is closed, I am going to make a major change in what I report to include everything including my SBA loan and my HELOCs. I didn’t put those into the debt snowball because they aren’t bankrupt-able in my situation. I’ve talked to a bankruptcy attorney and I still don’t know if I will end up filing. I don’t know how this will end, but I’m going to fight it all the way down.

Here are my new debt snowball balances; the above balance of April 2007 plus the rest of my debts. Listed are original balance, current balance, total payments made since 4/2007 and payments this month. I won’t start comparing monthly balances until March 2008.

Status Report:

February 2008 payments: $792.35
Total amount of payments made to date: $10,787
Debts left to pay off: 16
Next debt in line: at&t advertising and publishing: $429.53

Balance Report:

Original Debt Balance: $200,946
Current Debt Balance: $199,338
Balance change since last month: N/A
Balance change since starting the plan (April 2007): $1,608 (decrease)

All debt reports will be based on these numbers starting in March 2008. This is everything except the first mortgage on my house.

My Vocation

I’ve finally figured out what my vocation is:

I help people fight for economic and social justice to better their lives by assisting them to remove those barriers to their success.

Right now, I do that by tutoring, home-schooling and writing about these issues on my blogs. This blog is a specific story about my own experience of economic justice. In the past I volunteered, had hurricane evacuees stay in my home, helped friends with child custody and other divorce issues, and assisted my son’s school with donations to pay for books and supplies.

I haven’t written about the general topics as much as about specific experiences. I plan to add more about the general topics as my blogs grow, now that I’ve articulated my vocation. It’s sufficiently broad that I can do many things for a living and still fulfill it. It’s clear to me now that working in the chemical industry did not fulfill my vocation, and is probably why I always had a TGIF attitude.

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February 10th, 2008 Posted by joubess | Career, Debt Reports | no comments

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.

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

Mid-terms are Over!!!

I think I’m just as excited as my students that mid-terms are over. I feel like I used to at the end of final exams in college — totally wiped out.

I have 14 students and 7 subjects. I’ve been putting in over 20 hours per week, which is a lot tutoring. Teachers generally teach 6 hours out of 7 and only one to a few subjects. I also have no benefits, but I love the flexible schedule. It allows me to have a business and blog.

I love tutoring, though, because I get to work one-on-one with my students and when they succeed at something that’s been hard for them I’m so proud of their progress. Sometimes they credit me for their improvement, but it’s not me that’s doing the improving. I’m only helping them to understand their subject better. They do the learning and the work. It’s their success. I can tutor and help a student from now until doomsday, but if that student doesn’t want to improve, he or she won’t improve. So when a student improves it’s because they learned from me and were able to apply that new skill or knowledge to perform better in class and on tests.

It’s the greatest feeling in the world when something you do makes such a big difference in someone else’s life. No amount of money could cause that feeling.

However, I do have to make a living. My current pay rate is $19/hour, so this month I will bring in about $1170. It may be a little more because I’m working with a student who is catching up over the break due to a hospitalization. I’m not sure how many hours we’ll get in before the end of the month.

I’ll also be getting a refund from my divorce attorney from a couple of years ago for a medical payments reimbursement issue I was facing. I’m not sure how much that will be, but I’ll take it. My ex and I worked out our own deal to reimburse me for out-of-pocket medical expenses based on our original support agreement and I didn’t need to have my attorney involved. All she ended up doing for me was writing a letter to get the ball rolling.

That’s really the best way to do it. By now we’ve been divorced long enough to be able to talk things out concerning our son without a court having to be involved. We learned that whatever we do, it has to be in his best interest, so we’d better figure that out and live by it, and we can do it on our own. I think we’ve finally learned how to be grown-ups about dealing with joint custody issues. We have our disagreements, but we’ve agreed to disagree, we don’t discuss those issues unless we have to, and we work it out from their.

I’ve got to get my blogging earnings up. I’m about to do lesson two of the Blog Mastermind class I’m taking. I’m also going to finish my home office organization project and then sell that blog because I just don’t have enough passion to keep writing about it. I’m also selling my red beans and rice recipes blog. There are a lot of other people out their much more suited to those topics than I am. If any of you, my readers, are interested in those two topics, I will be learning how to value their current content soon, and I’ll be putting a sales price on them.

I haven’t decided what I’m doing with my Invader Zim Episodes blog. I have been able to post to it somewhat regularly, and I really do love the show. I only wish it came on more often.

The blogs I’ll be keeping and posting to regularly are:

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December 21st, 2007 Posted by joubess | Career, Earnings Updates | no comments

November 2007 Earnings, Traffic, and Subscribers

This post is a short report of what I accomplished in November compared to October 2007.

Earnings:

Adsense: Nov. $9.86; Oct. $0.56 % increase: 1761%
Amazon Associates: Nov. $0.40; Oct. 0.58 % decrease: 31%
Commission Junction: none both months
Clickbank: none both months
Associated Content: none both months

Subscribers (November only):

Number of Site Visitors (November only):

Right now I’m using the number of site visitors to measure activity. I’m not sure if I should be using that number or page views. I also want to get my sites’ stickiness up to at least 2 minutes on average. If you are interested in the site’s content you will stay around longer to read or view what’s there.

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December 3rd, 2007 Posted by joubess | Career, Goals | no comments

What are you most afraid of?

Amy Bass put up a great post on her blog. Check out this My Debt Free Goal post.

Right now, my biggest fear is failure to launch on my current business ventures. If I don’t start making a significant income pretty soon on at least one of them, I’ll have to go back to the dreaded j-o-b, that is if I can find one.

I haven’t been able to find a job in the chemical industry since 2003. I have a set of extremely specialized skills that are no longer marketable. I’m a wet lab chemist. Most companies no longer have wet labs or use these techniques (titration mostly). I also have a lot of development and problem solving skills because I worked in R&D and it was my job to develop methods and solve problems. My old lab partner and I also took our wet techniques to the next level - fully automating them using computer controlled titrators, specialized electrodes and applied the chemistry from visual titration methods to accomplish this. Companies mostly switched to instrumental techniques like NMR, IR, GC, LC, and ICP. They no longer use titration methods. So I’ve been out of luck in job hunting in my field for some time.

Why and Why Not?

First question: why not get training in one or more of those instrumental techniques? The minimum amount of training I’d need would be to go to graduate school and get my master’s degree in an area using one of those techniques. Companies don’t want a list of courses, they want evidence of experience and success with a technique and they don’t want to bare the expense of employees acquiring those skills until the employee has shown he/she is worth it. So, they’re not going to hire me just to see if any training classes I’ve taken were sufficient. I’d have to get a master’s degree because to get one you have to gain a lot of experience in research while you’re gaining course credits and grades. When you’re done, you graduate, too, and companies value advanced degrees.

Why not get a master’s degree in chemistry in one of those areas? I don’t have the money, savings, time, energy or the drive it would take to get one right now. I have a twelve-year-old and family responsibilities. Graduate school full-time is a 60-80 hour per week commitment with extremely little pay, and it would last for two years. It’s been 22 years since I’ve been a full-time student and since I’ve studied advanced level chemistry, physics and math. I’m not sure I still have what it would take to succeed.

Other Options

Why not get a master’s degree in another field? That is just the ticket. I’m currently working on it on a part-time, cash-only basis in personal financial planning. I’m getting there, but part-time sure doesn’t move like full-time school does. There will be rewards along the path with this as well, an RFC credential when I finish my first 6 classes, and eligibility to take the CFP(r) exam and be awarded the CFP(r) credential. Then I can finish my coursework and get an M.S., too. I can also choose to stop after my first 6 classes because I’ll be able to get a CFP(r) at that point, and that’s the credential consumers look for in a financial adviser.

My other option is to get my teaching license and teach chemistry. That is very doable with a few courses part-time. Lord knows the schools here need good science teachers. After being in the field for 19 years, I already bring a lot of experience to my tutoring students. Having tutored so many in science, I know I could do as good a job as any science teacher currently out there, and probably make it a lot more fun.

Vicious Circle

But in the meantime, I’ve got to have a sufficient income to support me and my family. Earning a decent living is interfering with my coursework completion, which is slowing down my future business prospects, which leads me right back to where I am now, in need of a decent income. It’s a vicious circle right now. And, because of the years without a steady income, I wracked up all the debt this blog is about. The only debt I had at the end of 2003 when I was laid off was my home’s first mortgage. So income is my first priority right now.

That is why I’m putting so much effort and time (but no money) into internet marketing. If I had a sufficient passive income along with my tutoring income, cutting expenses, and selling accumulated junk to make lump-sum debt payments, I could support my family, finish my classes, get my credentials and be free to pursue whatever future career path I choose. And pay off all this debt much fast than I can right now.

I still haven’t made my first $10 online with 30DC, and I’ve stalled at day 27. The last week of training had so much stuff to do that I haven’t implemented much of it yet on my 4 niche topics. I’m working on that, but not with the focus I had before day 27.

Am I stalled because I fear succeeding wildly at this? I don’t think so. I’ve always loved success. It feels really good. I do tend to be impatient when it comes to getting things accomplished. If I’m distracted too often from something, I’ll lose momentum and go on to something more interesting with fewer distractions. I’m not going to let that happen this time. I succeeded at completing a 4-year college degree in 6 years after changing my major 5 times, so I can succeed at online marketing, too. It sure won’t take me 6 years. Six months, maybe, but not 6 years.

I believe a lot of my momentum loss has to do with the back-to-back anniversaries of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita. The lack of focus and energy is probably being caused by some depression creeping through my medication, but that’s bound to happen with such traumatic events in the recent past. I’m beginning to get my focus back and get my momentum going again. This year was the first year I’ve actually felt angry about the levee failures in New Orleans, the bungled response by FEMA and the extreme lack of federal help to rebuild a major American city and a state that contributes so much to the U.S. economy. That story is on my hurricane Katrina pictures blog. I don’t really remember much about this time last year at the first anniversary, only that I was having a hell of a time getting out of bed in the morning. I did it, but I really can’t tell you how. I was numb, and numb gets you nowhere. It’s a complete lack of emotion, or the result of turning your emotions off and your mind turning them into physical fatigue, an avoidance mechanism. If you’re asleep you don’t feel depressed. Anger is a much better, more motivating emotion.

So, enough rambling about success and failure. Back to cleaning off my desk and working on my 30DC sites! Maybe I should have named my 30DC blog: $10, come hell or high water.

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September 11th, 2007 Posted by joubess | Career | no comments

What's this blog about?

This is the story of my journey to debt freedom from the prison of high credit balances, obscene interest charges and fees, overwhelming minimum payments, legal judgments, writs of seizure and chapter 7 bankruptcy.