I'm doing this in the hope of getting myself back on track. Please help me, for I have strayed...
I've been reading MMM from the beginning, like literally 2 months after he began blogging, and I've been following his sage advice to fix what was a dumb situation. We got to a good place, and on the way to better places. Paid off all credit card debt, but still chipping away at car and student loan debt, but still better than we were. We lowered expenses, cancelled cable, switched cell phones to AirVoice, and even got a good bit of money put away in savings, more than we ever had before. Still far from mustachian, but an enormous improvement.
I haven't been on the forum in months, and that's a problem. I went away because I did some DIY home improvement projects with some of the aforementioned savings. These were things I’d been wanting to do for the past 6 years of living in this house, but didn't really have the money to accomplish until recently. So why not ride the wave? With the help of my dad I put a new floor in our living room, and remodeled a bathroom, complete with tub and tile replacement. I feel like a badass for doing it! But remodels cost $$, even if you’re doing them yourself, and that would have been fine if I could have stemmed the spending and limited it to my home improvements, but alas I reacted to this a bit like a recovered addict; I found a trigger and couldn't seem to stop the spending, justifying it all in my head along the way.
To keep this from getting too long winded, I have just kept spending and haven’t been able to reel myself back in. I opened a few rewards cards a while ago, and while I pay them off every month, the fact that I’m using them to essentially defer a purchase has become a problem, and I've been over-spending myself. We've also allowed the grocery bills to expand, and we've been buying more beer. Yes, I pay the cards in full every month, but a few of those months required dipping into savings to do so, and that is no good. Bad Aspiring Mustachian.
So I’m here to repent. I’m cancelling all but one reward card, and I’ll probably keep it for true emergencies. I’m also going to reign back in the grocery spending, and I’m going back to shopping with a calculator. And the extraneous expenses are going to get a limit, like an allowance in cash. I worked hard to fix this stuff the first time, I don’t need to go back to the bad place where we started.
Okay – time to hit me with face punches or tar & feathers….whatever floats your boat. I deserve it. But please, after the beating, offer some thoughts or advice to help a $inner like me from going off the rails again. I could always use a little more motivation to keep on the straight and narrow.