A Story Of Debt

I was driving home from the grocery store several days ago, going through the numbers in my head to figure out if I could still make my January goal.  I do this all the time and I get very stressed about whether I can make my goal or not.  The goals are not easy; they don’t leave any room for error.

This one time, though, I guess because the answer was that I couldn’t make my goal, it occurred to me how silly it is to stress myself out about a goal I made for myself and that no one else even knows about (the specific number, I mean) and that is a serious stretch (so I am likely to fail and even if I do, I still will have put a lot of money toward my debt).

I’m not usually good at following rules I’ve set for myself, but I just really want to be out of debt and the thought of getting complacent in this makes me very anxious.

The thing about spending money is that you can’t go cold turkey.  I still have to eat and I need a roof over my head!  Sometimes it’s hard for me to draw the line between being reasonable and giving myself too much slack.  There are many ways to approach getting out of debt and I took a page out of Dave Ramsey’s book and am doing it with gazelle-like intensity.

This is the way I want to do it, but I can’t say that the stress isn’t really stress.  It is stress, but the adrenaline-fueled kind and not the dread-filled kind.  One way I stress myself out is by keeping very little in my checking account at a time (it’s over draft protected with my savings account, which has $300 in it).  Often I’m trying to get through a week on $50, which I can do since I don’t have to get gas regularly and aside from bills, groceries are my only big expense.  It’s a game to see if I can do it.

I think the whole thing occurred to be suddenly as silly because I was in this mindset that I am poor and this is all the money I have in the world right now. That’s ridiculous in a sense, because I’m actually bringing in quite a bit of money–enough to put hundreds of dollars toward my debt every month.  But, it’s completely true in another sense, because, of course, I am in debt!  I have available credit, but not money that isn’t owed to someone else.

I can see myself starting to think of money differently.  Most importantly, I’m breaking the habit of looking at available credit as available funds.  And the challenge is fun.

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