The Dollar Dance

This morning, I felt terrible. Coughing fits, fever, chills -- terrible. I took the day off of work and miraculously felt better when I woke up again at 9:30, so I spent the day dealing with some things I'd been putting off. I paid some bills, did some laundry, and signed up for some credit cards. There is a bubble, like a shockwave or sonic boom, of 0% interest credit card debt riding our income, threatening to overcome us if all of it expires at once. Every Spring, it comes close, and then we sign up for a few new cards, transfer the balances over, and continue to ride it out. It's not a very good plan, but it's the best we could come up with on the way down.

I get paid semi-monthly and rosinavs gets paid biweekly, which is actually a really convenient way to earn money when deep in debt. All of my income goes toward paying the monthly expenses: credit card bills, condo fees, utilities, commuter rail passes, etc. and all of her income goes toward paying the day-to-day expenses: food, gas, entertainment, etc. There's not a lot of room in the budget, but what there is, we sock away for the annual expenses: car insurance, real estate taxes, income taxes.

We keep track of our expenses in a spreadsheet on Google Docs, so we can both edit it at any time from anywhere. While updating things, I got to take a look at our debt numbers and sure enough they've been going down. It sometimes feels like we'll never make any progress (mostly because we're still very underwater on the house), but, besides a certain very expensive cat, the debt is going down. Very soon I'll have my student debt paid off.

We're not out of the rapids yet. We've got income taxes next month and real estate taxes the month after that, but at that point, it should be fairly smooth sailing for a good six months.