Zero Money to Hero Money » debt
Wow what a relief, a bit of a tight one, but I made it through the long weekend, with enough money left over for a movie tomorrow night, and probably $10 to just put in savings by Friday. I planned it fairly well, 2 rounds of golf meant taking $28 out of my budget, plus the golf balls, another $20. I ended up having a 2nd round and playing 36 holes today, but we somehow managed to convince the course to let us play again for free, and only charge us half price for the Cart, so our greens fees went from the regular $48 with a cart, to $15 each. Not too shabby.. it was snowing when we arrived for our first 18 so I guess they felt kind of bad.
I ended up spending my extra money where I thought I would, and where I didn’t want to. Coffees for all the guys in the morning before golf, breakfast at golf when we got there and it was snowing (in may??) and decided to wait it out, and a couple of beers at a concert that I went to on Saturday night with my girlfriend. All in all, I think I made my $140 budget of fun money play out pretty well for a long weekend. 2 BBQ’s, 3 rounds of golf and a concert.
On top of my extra $600 from last week coming in this week in the form of cheque, I have that event on Sunday for roughly $400, as well as another short 3-4 hour web development contract which means an additional $260 to the bank. Woohoo!
I’ve got my yearly golf trip that I haven’t saved for on June 2-3, and a trip to Cuba that’s already been paid for on June 14th for a week with my girlfriend. So I plan on taking $275 from the cheque this week for the golf trip, and putting the rest into the LOC and then taking $200 from the $400 for the trip to Cuba, and banking the other $200 + $260 back into the LOC. That means an extra $750+ into the LOC, that should really help out my May goals, not to mention my 2008 10k+ additional income goal is appearing even more attainable than ever.
Assets:
- Partial Downpayment on house - $10,000
- Car - $16,000.00
- Retirement - $8,500
- Cash (checking & savings) - $0.00
Total Assets: $34,500
Liabilities:
- Line of Credit - $4000
- Car Loan - $13,250
- Couch - $1300
Total Liabilities: $18,550.00
Net Worth: $15,950.00
Goals for June 1st 2008:
- Line of credit - under $1500 owing
- RRSP - add $250
- Car Loan - under $13000
I bit the bullet, and started up this personal finance blog as an extra motivator to get me to save money, and spend less. I already do the budgets, the spreadsheets, the automatic withdrawls etc etc, but I still go way over my monthly alloted budget without realizing it. I’m hoping that by setting goals and monitoring them through this blog I will pay closer attention to where I’m spending the money and hopefully achieve saving more than I normally would. Every month I hope to set financial goals to reach for the next month, and track them through this blog.
A little bit about myself: I’m 27 years old, and almost a first home owner who lives in Canada. I work in high tech doing software development and photography / web design as a side job. I’ve been working full time for a couple of years now and should have a lot more money saved than I do. I did however make the very stupid mistake in university of spending way more than I made in my part time jobs and summer jobs. Resulting in almost 25k worth of debt on credit cards and lines of credit by the time I graduated. It took me nearly 2 years of full time work to pay it all off, and actually I’m not fully out of debt yet.
Currently I’m sitting at 10k paid to the company I’m buying my home from as a partial downpayment, an additional 9k in RRSP and I still owe $3500 on my line of credit. On top of that I have a car loan that still has roughly 2 years left at $250 bi-weekly for my 2005 Mazda 3. By September 15th my goal is to have 30k total for the downpayment on my condo (just over 15% of my mortgage value). I’ve got some work to do.
