Blogging Away Debt

My Life is Too Dependant on the Internet

Today was not a good day. I log on in the morning to “go to work” and I can’t get online. I call the DSL company, only to spend about an hour an a half doing diagnostics. In the end they finally tell me that it’s not a problem on my end.

It turns out that the entire area where I live was without internet and cell phones because a fiber optic cable was cut. What irks me is that my big DSL company is so detached from their customers that they didn’t realize this and relay that information to me. Instead I wasted an hour and a half of my time on the phone. I ended up finding out about the cable because I saw it on my evening news. I wish a local company offered DSL.

I probably shouldn’t be so hard on them, but when my internet is down – I can’t work. I have people depending on me and I can’t do anything. That is the worst feeling in the world for me. Of course, I have internet now thank goodness. But with missing today, I will probably be working tonight and this weekend to catch everything up. I’m not looking forward to that.

I love working at home, but being at the mercy of your internet provider can be a major drawback. But overall, I wouldn’t trade my job. Having my son come in my office when he wakes up in the morning and giving me a hug and telling me to have a good day working is priceless 🙂

Am I On Track to Meet My Goal Date?

by Tricia

Although I have been seeing my credit card debt go down, I haven’t really been adding up the numbers to make sure I am still on track to meet my goal date of May 2009. In my mind, I was just figuring that I was meeting the goal of paying $1050/month towards credit cards but I haven’t really been checking it. That’s bad of me, I know. But whenever there is a problem, you need to find a solution.

My solution is to keep track of another set of numbers monthly. It is the total amount that I have paid to the credit cards (and Prosper loan) during a single month.

Here’s how July panned out:

Credit Card #1: $228
Credit Card #2: $1.38
Credit Card #4: $400, $400, $200, $10 = $1010
Credit Card #7: $150
Prosper Loan: $112

Total paid: $1501
Difference from Target Amount: +$451

Whew – that looks great. But June wasn’t so good:

Credit Card #1: $231
Credit Card #2: $476

Total paid: $707
Difference from Target Amount: -$343

June was actually a weird month because I shifted our debt all around and actually didn’t have statements for three of my current debts because they were new. I could have started paying on them, but didn’t. If I had added up my payments in June I would have realized that I was under my target payment amount and I should have paid some more.

Lesson learned: When you set a goal, check up on your progress periodically to make sure you are still on track to meet it. Just because things seem like they are going well doesn’t mean that they are.

* see that $10 payment to Credit Card #4? That’s the payment that put me under the $30,000 mark 😉