Day 5: My Financial Freedom
Today, is Dr. Martin Luther King Junior’s birthday. Thankfully, I had the day off. I was able to run some errands and go to the shopping center I mentioned I needed to go to in Journal Entry 3 (which you can find here). It was a lot easier than I had anticipated. Especially when the focus is towards my financial freedom.
Returning my gift was smooth and surprisingly not a tempting process. Something is shifting for me when I walk into clothing stores now. I can feel the difference. Like when I walk into a Sephora now after I made a pact with myself to not buy unnecessary beauty products. I’m really happy I didn’t walk out with a shopping bag of new items in my hand today.
I did spend on food though. I spent $36.22 on food. To me it was worth it because I got to have lunch with my girlfriend and catch up with her. It was nice getting out the house and hanging out with another adult other than my kids.
When I was writing yesterday’s blog post (click here to read), I mentioned how tired I was and that I was going to call it a night. Except, I didn’t call it a night. I ended up going to bed at 3am this morning. I figured since I had today off, I’d sleep in (I didn’t).
What I ended up doing until the early morning was go over my finances. When I was getting ready for bed, I played a YouTube video of YouTuber Aja Dang. She was helping one of her viewers create a plan to get out of debt. I was so inspired, it motivated me to start on my financial freedom plan right then and there.
I opened my spreadsheet which I created a long time ago to keep track of my debt and expenses. The creation of this spreadsheet was inspired by Money A Love Story by Kate Northrup (check it out here) which I highly recommend reading.
I used to regularly work on my spreadsheet when I did a better job at my finances. I’d schedule a date with myself (as Kate Northrup suggests), and consistently worked on updating my debt and expenses in the spreadsheet. She also recommended naming it something like Blessings I Received. Let’s refer to my spreadsheet as BIR.
However, once my credit started getting better, I let the regular updates go and stopped staying on top of my finances. I tried to “wing it” with my debt and expenses since I figured my credit was good. Obviously, that didn’t work because now here we are, 6-figures deep. And trust me, it doesn’t come easy for me to share that. There’s a lot of shame in it for me. Trust. My family and friends don’t even know.
This journey of documenting my path towards my financial freedom is truly humbling, to say the least.
Since I stopped going on “dates” with myself to work on my finances, I’d periodically update my BIR. Sometimes, I would go for months without opening BIR. And when I did, it felt more like a chore, instead of something fun, like those dates I used to have. I only updated the balances of what I owed. I never updated anything else like the APR, minimum due, due dates, or my expenses if there were any changes.
I felt like if I updated the balance, at least I was still doing something responsible towards my finances and not totally ignoring my debt. Oh what lies I tell myself so I didn’t have to face the truth nor confront the issue.
The truth is, although my credit’s good, I had bad financial habits.
So yea, last night I stayed up until 3am updating everything that needed to be current and confronting the real numbers head on. I already knew of the hole I dug myself into and how deep. What I didn’t know was that, when I calculated all of my expenses and debt, I should still have $1000 left over by the end of the month! I never realized this amount. It made me so confused on where my money went because it never felt like I had anything left.
In fact (as mentioned in Journal Entry 1 found here), my checking account would consistently be negative for a couple of days. The balance I have left over really opened my eyes and made me think, “What the actual F…!” I’ve been that careless?!
I know I was being careless with my debt but I didn’t realize I was being that careless with my cash either. I mean, to the point that I couldn’t even account for a G ($1000)?! No wonder my financial freedom plan doesn’t exist!
I admittedly was very willfully ignorant.
I was right yesterday. I wrote that the stock market might be closed today in observation for Dr. King’s birthday. I think tomorrow, I will cash out one of my investments and put it towards a debt I have beef with. This investment I’m cashing out is one of my smaller investments. It won’t make such a drastic impact but I’m taking baby steps towards my financial freedom.
Oh and if you’ve been reading, I finally figured out the leaking water situation in my garage. A drain is clogged that discards dirty water from my washing machine and sink. I got a quote from a plumbing company, and they wanted to charge me $580! I’ve had this happen before and my handyman at the time (7 years ago) charged me $70!
Fortunately, I found a handyman on Thumbtack who will do it for $150. I hope I like him so I can use him again to fix other things around the house. I hate dealing with these kind of things.
Stay tuned as I keep you posted about my financial freedom adventures! Be sure to sign up, if you haven’t done so already. Your support would mean the world to me!
Where do you go to get things fixed in your home? Do you enjoy the process or loathe it as much as I do? Or are you indifferent?
As always, thanks for reading!
Love, Sutivi.
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