Starting Balances calculated post-bankruptcy (May 2008):
- Debts excluding student loans and 1st mortgage: $38,707
- Plus debts incurred between May 2008 and March 2009: $8,583
- Student loans: $80,215
- Total: $245,308 $127,050
Current Debt Balances:
- IRS: $2,148.39 (TY 2007)
- LDR: $3,168.21 (Louisiana Department of Revenue, TY 2007, interest added, negotiating regular payment, made $18.10 pmt)
- Chase HELOC?: $4,537.52 bankrupting
- CFCU Visa: $6,142
- Capital One HELOC: $21,434.14
Debt Balance excluding co-signed student loans and first mortgage: $36,137 $32,893
Student Loans:
- Co-signed student loans, approximate balance: $80,215 (found out the new balance when my attorney checked my credit report. No letters I’ve received add up to this much. Attorney is checking on it).
Total balance including student loans: $116,352 $113,108
Change since highest balance ($127,050 starting May 2008): $13,942
Discussion
I took the first mortgage balance out of the debt report. That’s not in the list of debts I need to pay off first, and we have to live somewhere. Balance totals changed substantially because of it.
I also found out the Chase loan isn’t a HELOC, so it’s going with the rest of the debts in the bankruptcy.
The changes are based on my attorney’s advice for going forward after I sign the papers tomorrow.
To see everything I owed before I changed my balances to “post May 2008″, read my May 2008 Debt Report. Interest, fees and penalties have been added since then, and the actual amount of the student loans is now on my credit report with the correct amount due.
Technorati Tags: bankruptcy update, debt free or bust, Debt Reports, June 2009 debt report
June 29th, 2009 Posted by joubess | Bankruptcy, Debt Reports | no comments
My 2008 taxes were done on Monday, and I was able to finish up the rest of the paperwork I needed to turn in to my attorney this week.
I turned the rest of it in today. They’ll probably file on Monday, unless they go through my information and find something missing. I’ve been through the list twice and I checked everything off, so if something is missing it will be because I did it wrong rather than forgot it.
I added another tutoring client starting next Tuesday and Thursday for 2 hours each day. The more work I can get the better. That means more income.
I’ll have a June debt report in the next few days.
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P.S. The Articles page is working again. I got the plugin sorted out. It’s not complete yet because I have to repopulate it manually.
Technorati Tags: bankruptcy update
June 19th, 2009 Posted by joubess | Bankruptcy | no comments
This blog was intended to be my journey through my career crises and money problems. I meant for it to be a tool to help me more than anything else. On my end, it is continuing to be that kind of blog.
Recently, a few readers have become verbally abusive of my life and circumstances, and have left nasty and even cruel comments. They don’t understand the internet business world and how it works. They don’t understand that niche ideas are equivalent to industrial trade secrets.
They also fail to see that I have two businesses. I’m not unemployed or drawing unemployment benefits. I tutor math and science to middle and high school students and make a pretty decent living doing it. Tutoring is my primary source of income right now.
I haven’t apparently been clear enough with my readers that tutoring is extremely busy during the months of December and May. December is mid-term exams and May is final exams. I spend little time online during those two months.
School year 2008-2009 was unusual because of Hurricane Gustav. Students missed 15 days of school in September, and schedules were changed substantially. We were waiting for power and other services to be restored. Students had less time off on Thanksgiving break, Christmas break, Mardi Gras and in May to make up those days. That left me far less online catch-up time during the school year. Even though content production suffered because of it, my income increased.
Now that I’m tutoring on my own, I’ve had to set up the tutoring business and that takes time offline. I’ve only had 20 days to set things up on the fly as I see students and figure out how I want to run things. I’m doing a lot of the same things as my previous boss, but I am changing a couple of things. My prices are $5/hr cheaper on each package because I believe she raised her prices at the wrong time this past school year. In a recession, prices have to be more competitive, so I went back to the prices she used the year before this one and had used for a few years. They make me a little more competitive with the companies out there. I also get to keep all the revenue which resulted in a big raise for me.
Because some readers are fairly ignorant about what I’m doing with my time, they believe they know what is best for me in my life than I do, and proceed to tell me all about their lives and how I should do things there way. I’m accused of being lazy and unemployed. I am neither.
Comments are off because:
- Businesses are real jobs.
- I don’t owe anyone an explanation of exactly how I spend every minute of my time.
- I don’t owe anyone an explanation of what time I take off and how I spend that time.
- I don’t have to answer to anyone about what I choose to watch on TV.
- Just because I publish what I’m doing online does not give anyone the right to beat me up verbally.
- I’m spending far too much time answering these nasty comments, and that takes away from both my businesses, raises my blood pressure and raises my anger level too far.
- These comments set off my chronic depression. When my depression is worse, I have a much harder time writing and getting other tasks done. It’s tough enough to get out of bed without being kicked.
- Therefore, I don’t need a small chorus of assholes making things worse.
I have no explanation for why people are so cruel with so little empathy for the plights of others less fortunate than they are, nor why they think they can get online on someone’s blog and proceed to figuratively tear them to shreds. I see this cruelty and lack of empathy more often than I ever have. It seems to go along with what happened during the last 8 years during the George W. Bush administration:
- The rich got much richer and far less generous (philanthropy is down considerably).
- The middle class became disenfranchised and some became poor or working class.
- The middle class bore the brunt of taxes while corporations and the rich took their earnings offshore to avoid paying any taxes at all.
- The living standard of the middle class declined.
- The real income of the middle class declined (and this is probably why philanthropic giving declined; the middle class is more generous than many of the rich).
- The rhetoric against anyone having financial trouble and getting and keeping jobs is some kind of moral failing on their part and is condescending and cruel.
- Poverty is a moral failing of those who are poor, and these people need to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. That’s hard to do when you don’t have any boots.
- To those doing well, jobs and financial problems have nothing to do with the economy or the robbery of the public by the conglomerated financial system from which the wealthy benefited the most.
Now the far right and other religious and anti-government extremists have set a tone in this country for domestic terrorism: hate crimes and violent rhetoric which have led and are leading to murder of other American citizens. There were three domestic terrorist related murders over just 11 days in the past two weeks.
This nasty and dangerous rhetoric is spilling over into non-violent but still inflammatory speech, and the anonymity of the internet is propagating it into verbal attacks on individuals who are not anonymous on their blogs, websites and social media pages.
So, comments will not be accepted on this blog until further notice. I don’t have the time or energy to deal with this much bullpuckey.
Technorati Tags: blog comments turned off, commentor verbal beatings, debt free or bust, unacceptably negative blog comments
June 12th, 2009 Posted by joubess | General | no comments
This is the second article about Google AdSense, being banned from it, and finding alternatives to the program. I described being banned in my previous article: Banned from Google AdSense. In this article I discuss the alternatives I chose for advertising revenue on my blogs and other websites.
If you find yourself banned from Google AdSense, there are many alternatives for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising available. If you search “alternatives to adsense” or “PPC advertising programs” you’ll find many advertising services that have publisher programs.
I chose AdBrite for my ad publisher service. There aren’t as many size options but the other advantages still make it a far better service. Here is a 300 x 250 text/banner ad box:
I like AdBrite over other services because they have a low payout amount. Most have a $50-$100 payout amount, and unless you have lots of sites with lots of traffic, it will take a long time to reach payout.
AdBrite lets you set your payout as low as $5. Anytime you earn your minimum or above, your payment starts processing at the end of the month in which you reached the minimum, and they mail you a check 60 days after the end of that month. If you reached your payout amount at the end of March, you will receive your check sometime in the first 10 days of June. If you don’t make payout, they roll your balance over until you make your payout amount.
AdBrite also seems to have higher-paying advertisers because I’m making a lot more faster than I ever did with AdSense. AdSense barely paid me 10 cents a day from all my sites. After only a few months with their service, I’m making 35 cents a day and the rolling average daily amount grows each day, about doubling or more each month. The rolling average daily pageviews is also in the thousands where they were only in the hundreds with AdSense.
Other advertising income streams I use are privately sold text ads, Text-Link-Ads.com, and Kontera. I also privately sell banner ads for my blogs. I don’t really like Kontera, and I haven’t made payout with it yet. But I will eventually. Kontera is like the Amazon contextual ads program.
I also make money by hosting products and services from the eBay Publishers Network program and the Amazon Associates program. They both have low payout amounts as well, $5 for eBay and $10 for Amazon. eBay and Amazon pay directly to your bank account. I wish AdBrite would do direct deposit or pay via PayPal. Maybe they will adopt it in the future.
If you are unhappy with AdSense or were banned from it, I highly recommend AdBrite. You will earn more faster than with AdSense. If you are using other programs please leave your stories in the comments. I’m interested in how everyone is doing with their PPC programs.
Technorati Tags: AdBrite, Alternatives to AdSense, debt free or bust, earning money online, Google AdSense, income sources, PPC, publisher advertising programs, pushing income up
June 9th, 2009 Posted by joubess | Earnings Updates, Resources | 5 comments
