Blogging Away Debt Our Journeys to a Debt-Free Life

by Hope

I appreciate everyone’s feedback regarding my medical bills. I was able to eliminate one of them with a phone call  and cash settlement. Thank goodness for a very solid savings account. I am still working on the COVID hospital bill.

I continue to prioritize the medical bills over my mortgage and student loans. It looks like I will be able to pay off all of the unsecured debt by Fall of this year. Score!

Medical debt

I got a lot of negative feedback for my medical debt last month. As a result, I feel I need to clarify a few things.

I am maxing out my contribution to a HSA every month (and I did last year as well.) This is $7,200 towards medical bills. You all educated me on another way to use HSA. However, when I signed up for it last year, I fully anticipated using it for medical bills. So no, I did not include another medical line item in my budget. I didn’t see any need too.

When I set it up last year, I planned to pay for both Princess and Gymnast to get their wisdom teeth extracted. We have a high deductible health plan so figured it would get used. I did not plan for COVID, car wrecks, medical testing or even hearing aids. You cannot plan or anticipate those things. Thus more bills than anticipated. They might throw a kink in my plan but they are manageable.

And they are still coming…

Life updates

Life is pretty quiet and stable around here. Gymnast is working 20ish hours per week and doing school virtually. He is loving this freedom from the daily grind of the long school days.

Beauty is living at home but between work and school, I only see her in passing. She is saving money for 1) a new car and 2) to move out at some point. I am so proud of her.

Princess is working hard at maintaining her grades. I think I mentioned previously that her first semester was not the best and she knows that she has to get her GPA up this semester to maintain her grant money. But I’m really proud of how focused she has been this semester.  She comes home at the end of next week, first time she’s been home this semester, for spring break. I’m so excited to see her.

Twins visit regularly and are both doing well. We eat together about once a week and catch up.

Court costs

We have lots of court hearings this coming month. Gymnast for his wreck and resulting 5 citations from December. Me from my jail time and resulting 2 citations. I have priced lawyers for both…ouch!!! $1,500 for my tickets and $2,500 for Gymnast. I am going to chance Gymnast case without a lawyer but feel that I must bite the bullet and hire one for my case.

I’ve been told that if I’m convicted, which I shouldn’t be, but after recent dealings with this system, that I could lose my license for 6+ months. I cannot chance that. And more importantly, I cannot trust that right will just prevail. It’s more of a game than I ever anticipated versus just being right versus wrong.

House costs

Our second bathroom remodel should be complete in the next week or so. So ready for it to be done! We started it in November. It’s been slow going and I’ve had to make lots of compromises to stay in budget and keep costs down. But I’m happy with how it’s turning out and overall, making this a three bedroom/two bath house (instead of 1 1/2 bath) will pay off in the long run for resale value. I will owe a total of $400 to a contractor once the bathroom is complete.

This week I decided to spend an unexpected $700 to have a wildlife prevention company come in and secure the house from rodents and wildlife. While we haven’t seen anything in the house, we did find an entry point where something chewed through the sheetrock in the bathroom closet (the one currently under renovation.) I am not taking any chances! (This comes out of a healthy savings account that I continue to put $300 into every month so it will not affect my budget at all.)

Income

My income remains steady with my corporate job. But there’s been a good deal of upheaval in my department. (Hello, corporate world politics!) As a result of some of that, members of my team are receiving a $10,000 monthly bonus (divided between the team, not individually) based on workload and such.  Therefore, I did receive some extra income this month and anticipate getting some for the next few months, but it will vary.

This bonus is taxed at 22% as supplemental income or something like that. But all the “extra” that winds up in my check will go directly to debt. I’m not putting it in my budgeted money so it doesn’t get allocated anywhere else.

Also, my job did give every employee $500 towards home office needs which was not taxed this month. So that went into the “pay off debt” pool too.

Hope

Hope is a creative, solutions-focused business manager helping clients grow their business and work more efficiently by leveraging expertise in project management, digital marketing, & tech solutions. She’s recently become an empty nester as her 5 foster/adoptive kids have spread their wings. She lives with her 3 dogs in a small town in NE Georgia and prefers the mountains to the beaches any day. She struggles with the travel bug and is doing her best to help each of her kids as their finish schooling and become independent (but it’s hard!) She has run her own consulting company for almost twenty years! Hope began sharing her journey with the BAD community in the Spring of 2015 and feels like she has finally in a place to really focus on making wise financial decisions.