Adventures in Debt

While cruising through my RSS feed list tonight, I came across an interesting post on WiseBread by Paul Michael. In it he talks about Retailmenot.com, which aggregates coupon codes for online shopping sites. What has me most intrigued is that there is a Canadian section. Yes, a Canadian section! Normally it’s difficult to find good deals online for Canadian shoppers, as most of the sites out there contain only American ones. I’m going to be sure to keep this site bookmarked next time I am looking for a deal.

Here are the monthly numbers for February.

Total Debt: $23958.10 (+ 1062.97 from last month)

Debt Paid off This Month: Not applicable since I went back over my original debt amount.

Total savings this month: $200 (not including interest)

Emergency Fund total: $ 1,906.57 (including the savings interest!)

As you can see, I went up in my debt again, which I am not pleased about, however I did manage to pay off some from last month, approximately $3000, which is pretty good. I also managed to get myself a good balance transfer deal with another bank, so for a whole year I’ll not be charged any interest at all on about 1/3 of the debt, which I think is another win for me. So I’ll be plugging along, making my payments and lowering the debt bit by bit. I haven’t yet started my next round of eBay selling, which I’m hoping to do in March. That should net me some extra cash that will help out. Last year I earned around $600 or so, so I’m looking forward to some more of the same.

I know some of you must be wondering why I’m not completely stopping all my spending and just concentrating on my debt repayment. Well, it’s because I believe in living life, within reason. I have tried doing the “I’m not spending on anything” plan, and I found it doesn’t work for me. I know it’s a sacrifice, and it’s my issue that I can’t deal with it, but I believe that life shouldn’t be completely difficult and unenjoyable. So I reduce my spending by not going out all the time, by telling friends that I’ll pass on going out for dinner with them, but that I’ll meet them for coffee afterwards. These are methods that work better for me, and I’m able to slowly but surely make headway on my debt. I was doing just that until I had to move, so once I get back down to the waterline of debt (probably in the next two months), I’ll be back to making good progress.

A few weeks ago I talked about how I had broken the passenger side mirror on my truck. It was just the mirror itself, and not the housing that was broken, so I was hoping to just replace that and not the whole thing. I had called the dealership and asked how much it would cost, and was told that if it’s the whole thing, then it would cost upwards of $450-500 after labour and taxes, not something to take lightly. So I decided to save up the cash and just tape the mirror in place.

With the recent cold snap we’re having right now, it’s hard to keep the mirror in place with the tape because the cold just makes tape un-sticky. Today while driving home from work, part of the tape came off and the mirror rattled all the way home. As it would happen, today is one of the days the dealership is open late, so I thought I’d pop in and see what they could do for me. Buddy comes out with me after I explained the problem, he takes a look and says “Oh yeah, we can just replace the glass, no problem.”

I took a deep breath and asked, “Are you sure?”

“Yep.”

What a huge sigh of relief! I knew that replacing just the glass would be significantly cheaper than replacing the whole unit, so I was glad to hear that. We then went to speak to the Parts Manager, and he looked it up and said that the glass costs all of $77. And then the Service Manager said he’d install it for me and save the labour cost! Most excellent. I am pleased about that, as it saves me about $350, which I can leave in my Emergency Fund.