Life is a convoluted mess sometimes. We have been working really hard cutting out unnecessary spending and doing other sacrifices over the last five years and we have pretty much gotten ourselves out of the control of credit card debt. I say this but I know that at any given moment Boy might "accidentally" use our Amazon account attached to the "house" prime account. I say it this way because I used to be opposed to shopping online, but slowly Boy introduced me and showed me how to use Amazon. He pays for the prime account and over time I ordered some stuff and it kept my bank card on file, then over the holidays I got an actual Amazon card. All this is kept on there, so when you go to pay, you can choose whichever method or card is best at that moment. Boy then occasionally gets "confused" or something and charges stuff on my account. No biggie if it's a $5-$10 thing, but some of his 3D printer stuff can easily be hundreds of dollars.
Anyways, now that we are down to just the basics, we have some income that isn't earmarked for credit cards, so naturally, Wife wants it put away so we can start a savings for a rainy day. I have always liked the idea that we should have around six months of money to pay bills saved up in case I loose my job or something like that. I promised Wife that would be goal number 1 if we got to that point. We have refinanced the house finally, mostly to get the amount paid off in fifteen years, but we did borrow a little money and consequently, we are on our way to saving up what I promised we would. I see this as free money because we had refinanced about five years ago, we still had about twenty five years to go on our mortgage. Refinancing now saved us about ten years time and cut our interest from 5.25 to 2.75, even if the payment went up a bit, we'll still get done before I am 65, if we are still around at that point.
The problem now is that I was in bed last night and felt a little suffocated with the idea of being disciplined and not spending money. I felt a lot freer when I had credit cards and squeezed a little here and a little there to get whatever we wanted/needed. Like big deal, if I don't spend anything and save every nickel for a year, maybe we can have an extra $20,000 at the end of the year in the bank. Woo-hoo, but who cares? That isn't even enough to pay for a boat outright plus I have to go for a year starving my needs and wants. Then I have to think that we still need to plan for a car/SUV for Baby A. My Excursion is super old, I need a newer SUV/truck for me. Do I split the difference and buy two $10,000 vehicles, that is just sad, living and thinking like that is what I deserve now? It is much easier to just say Fuck it and go finance a new car and make payments, but then we are back to not having the ability to save money. I guess I thought there would be an immediate payoff when we got to the point of paying off all the debt, like maybe a new Rolex or something, but I can't even do that, those fucking things have about doubled in cost and you can't even find good ones in stores.
I understand that getting out of the chokehold that credit had on us was a hard thing, but it was also super easy and convenient when you want to be impulsive and live in the now. It will probably be good, just knowing that paying off Citicard at over $20,000, more than half of the nearly $500 a month we paid just went to interest is satisfying. If I pay cash, then I will just pay for the thing and not that "little" surcharge they add after. I need to get smarter...
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