There’s a great post over at I’ve Paid for This Twice Already about What’s Your Life-Changing Money?
One thing I’ve learned as I’ve buried myself in painful self-analysis is how much cash flow impacts our money troubles. Our monthly cash flow is a carefully orchestrated house of cards that barely stays together. There is no room for either error, or fixes.
It’s not that we don’t make much money, we actually do quite well in that regard, it’s that our monthly payments seem to take it all long before we have a chance to do anything positive.
While I am beginning to work on fixing the problems from the bottom-up, I can’t help think of the positive impact we would realize if we were able to knock a few of these debts out of the way. (And really, that’s the whole point behind Ramsey’s Debt-Snowball)
It would be easy to just use the value of all of my outstanding debt, which would be nearly $250,000, when you include the house. That’s a bit disingenuous though, as I believe the spirit of the question is “What’s the smallest amount…”.
$1600 would eliminate a $300/mo payment. This is a loan I took from a close friend that’s been paying down at $150 per paycheck for some time. I have the money direct deposited into his account.
$2000 would clear out the remaining Payroll Advance checks (and no, I’m not proud of that) that we are forced to roll over every two weeks. This works out to around $600 per month.
Think about that for a second. I just wrote it and I’m sitting here a bit stunned. $3600 would increase my monthly cash flow by $900.
The process of learning about where my money was actually going has been eye opening, humbling, and more than a bit painful.
The title of this blog was meant tongue in cheek, in a self-deprecating manner. But honestly, I really am Too Smart to have gotten into this situation.
June 19th, 2008 at 12:25 am
I admire you for admitting your situation so bluntly. I am curious about how you will solve this dilemma. Let us know when you solve it. It really isn’t that much money to increase your monthly cash flow, is it!?
June 20th, 2008 at 9:29 pm
Wow. $3600 is a small amount in the grand scheme of things, but I’m sure it feels overwhelming right now. Good luck to you and please, let us know how you solve the situation.
July 2nd, 2008 at 2:20 am
Too Smart must immediately contact his loan advance companies explain his situation and set up affordable payments. Once the agreement is reached, Too Smart needs to keep his promise and make his payments on time. If possible, when the cash is available, make extra payments. As he payso off one loan, roll the amount due for that one to the next loan and pay it off in a more timely fashion than he would have expected. Too Smart is to continue doing this until he is out of payday loan debt and should never allow himself to reach this point again. I was in this same position and worked myself out of hole I’d dugged myself into using the same method. Trust me, you can and will eventually see the light and move on to find yourself out of payday loan debt.