Here goes.
You are making ends meet now, and you are in a ton of debt. You don't know where your money is going. If I've added correctly, your monthly expenses are:
debt service - 1601
Other expenses - 1240 (approximately)
Total - 2301
Take home - 2822 (your estimate)
That leaves about $500 per month unaccounted for. Where is this money going?
I think you've made a math error. 1601 + 1240 = 2841.
I've actually made some changes, so here, without further ado, is my updated goal list for next month:
Regular Income: $2934 (my paychecks recently went up a little)
Side Hustle Guaranteed Income: $281 ($75 for each Friday in the month minus 25% set aside for taxes)
Total Known Income: $3215 (I'll be getting a royalty check at the end of the month but amount currently unknown)
Car Payment & Insurance $104 (will be canceling this come June but for now it's a necessary evil)
Gas 0
DWP 0 (this is every other month, and it's an off month)
Gas Bill $15 (estimate)
Internet $25
Phone $31 (I am switching carriers and going with a lower-cost plan; it will eventually be $28 but there was minimal setup cost
Rent/Water $808
Digital Subscriptions $10 (I have canceled my Pandora and Google Drive and gotten some money from a friend to offset the shared Spotify)
Food $100 (I'm going to aim like hell for this—it's a significant cut so we'll see)
Yoga 0 (I have credits left)
Pets $70
Personal ~$13 (I'm about to run out of cranberry pills)
Gift 0
Band $10 (no rehearsals scheduled so far so this is just data storage)
Projected Total Spending: $1185
Projected Amount Left to Throw at Debt: $2030
Student Loan #1: $114 (This just went up by $4)
Student Loan #2: $271 (This will go up to $308 in July)
Back Taxes: $100
Bank Credit: $94 (this will be my last payment; I mostly wiped this out out this month)
CC #2: $150
CC #3: $50
CC #4: $50
Amount Left to Pay CC #1 (highest interest account): $1295
Beyond that, I'll try to answer your questions to the best of my ability...
Into this mix, you want to have a baby. How will you cover the expenses? You may qualify for government assistance, but that is not a ton of money and at best will only cover baby costs--not your debt payments. Living near the edge is workable when you're only responsible for yourself. Everything changes when you have a child.
I'm hoping to be close to done with most of my debt accounts before Hypothetical Kiddo enters the picture. Crunching the numbers, it seems that if I'm diligent with my frugality and don't experience too much of a rent increase when I move in June, it may be technically possible to clear all my credit card debt by next fall and then knock out most of my first loan in early 2020, even if my side hustle ends in a year. Figuring there will be other positives (biannual royalty checks, additional side hustles, likely small raises, two "extra paycheck" months per year) and some extra negatives (one family visit per year, some unexpected expenses) that will probably still work out net positive, IF I can keep my rent close to what it is and IF I can really swing the $100 food budget, it seems actually doable! Since I was planning to aim for about two years from now anyway, I think it even works out OK time-wise.
At that point, I'd just have one single (though still large) student loan and the back taxes left to pay for. I could probably knock out what remains of the tax debt at that point with a single large royalty check or an "extra" paycheck. Then I could take one of three approaches to that loan, depending on what makes sense at the time in the kid/no-kid situation: 1) keep throwing as much money as humanly possible at the loan; 2) make what the "real" payments would be (~$725); 3) make what the IBR payments would be (they get lower depending on family size). I'd probably aim for option 2 but be grateful for the existence of option 3 if need be. So with debt payments then no longer making up the bulk of my budget, I'd have money to spend on the kid—maybe not a TON, but since I'll have been building up my frugality muscles, I probably won't
need a ton.
Further--being a single parent means you alone are 100% responsible for a tiny human. Do you think there is no pressure in that? What about the pressure of stretching your few dollars? If you continue working, you will need to find child care. How will you pay for that? What will you do when the child care falls through (as inevitably happens sometimes)?
I'm super sure single parenthood (or even partnered parenthood) will be a high-pressure situation. And I'm generally a person who performs well under pressure (despite not generally preferring it). I just think it'll be totally different to be subjected to pressure because of something I love vs. something that I'm just doing for money and will likely not like that much—less than my current job anyway. Maybe I'm wrong, but most parents that I know say that yes, it is terrible pressure, but it is also worth it. Presumably it's the love that makes it tolerable.
You don't want to be bored. That's also perfectly OK. But do you understand that small children can be very boring at times?
Sure! I know that repetitive story time can get boring, and not being able to have an adult conversation with them can get boring. And cleaning up the same messes over and over can get boring. There's probably more. I'm willing to go through periods of boredom to get to the good stuff. I don't think it'll be
totally boring, though. Most kids I've known were a barrel of laughs at least some of the time.
What I really wish is that I could have a job doing some kind of manual labor and could listen to audiobooks all day.
House cleaning fits these requirements. Why aren't you doing this as a side gig now?
That's actually a really good idea. I hadn't thought of it, is all. I'm not sure whether people hire house-cleaners during evenings and weekends, and I'm not sure what extra stuff (a vacuum, etc.) I might have to acquire to make it work, or whether I'd need a car, but I could look into it. If people generally just have the supplies already at the house and I could just bike over, that could be a legit thing to do.
You have a desire for changes, but no realistic plans for accomplishing them. You are living in a fantasy, and your idea of having a child is part of the fantasy, because you don't seem to have a grasp of what kind of changes you will *need* to make.
Working on a realistic plan is what I'm here for. I just don't know that changing jobs is the right answer for me at this time as part of that plan. Part of it is that my history with my current company is that I was previously able to work remotely for a couple of years. It may be that by the time Hypothetical Kiddo arrives, I could ask to do that again. I know my bosses like me and like my work, and they might indeed allow it if I told them that I had a strong preference to basically go back to the hourly/freelance kind of setup they had me on from 2013–2015, and I feel like at that point my length of experience would allow me to justify an hourly rate that is higher than what I'm making now. They are also super family-oriented themselves, and I feel like they would understand my reasoning for it. I would much rather buckle down and side-hustle hard for a while than to trade out my main gig.
I do accept the possibility that I might miss my window. I know it's part of the list of possible outcomes. It's possible that it's already too late and I don't know it; in that case, I'll just be thankful that a side effect of my baby rabies was waking me up to improving my debt situation. But thank you for the food for thought about all of the ways that the situation will likely be challenging
