photo credit: Andrew Huff

A quick thought on the title: With my brother and sister both in from their respective corners of the country to celebrate Thanksgiving as well as my side’s Christmas, far too many opportunities to partake were presented. And, quite honestly, fully taken advantage of.

I don’t know about you, but I could probably skip eating for well into December and be just fine calorie-wise.

On that thought, we again had a comparatively frugal Christmas. And in the end, we were again just happy to be able to spend some time together without the day-to-day distractions that make you to forget what is really important. Namely, those close to us.

But we’re here to talk about some dollars, so on to the money front. While we knocked off right around our average debt amount, our earnings, well, soared. Like last month, the big push for November was definitely of the shovel building variety.

I really worked at the system I’ve been following, and have managed to more than double our income for November. In fact, depending on how a thing or two shakes out, it may be closer to tripling it! I still have to wait until mid-December for November’s commission checks to arrive, so again, nothing has been applied to the debt as of yet.

We will have to wait and see if anything approaching this level is maintainable outside of the holiday season. But unless I really ramp things up in an extreme way, I’ve finally reached the point where I can comfortably draw on this business’ earnings without slowing future progress down.

I have a feeling we are going to start seeing some major debt destruction in the near future!

Blog Carnivals are a great way to get a bit more exposure to those who might never stumble across your little site, as well as finding new sites to add to your reading list, but forever neglecting to submit anything sure doesn’t accomplish anything…

This week, one of my posts — ‘Apparently I Feel Differently About Debt‘ — appears in two of them:

• First off, I made an appearance on the always overwhelming Carnival of Personal Finance, hosted, minimally (a big fan of simplicity myself!), this week by Matthew @ Getting Green.
• My second showing is in the 91st episode of the Carnival of Debt Reduction, hosted by NCN on his podcast satellite site. (Oh, and helluva job on the PF front in general there, NCN!)

Thanks so much, both of you, for the effort involved in going through all those submissions, and making some sort of sense of them! And if you like a little sporadic publishing (I publish like I used to pay – irregularly – though I’m working on fixing that!), feel free to add my feed to your reader.

A couple months after I planned to, I finally got around to moving the whole site over to my Dreamhost account. Thought I might as well upgrade to the latest version of WordPress from the ancient version I was running while I was at it. And then, as long as I was doing that, might as well update the look of the site a bit entirely, with a mildly modified Fresh theme.

I’ve still got a tweak or ten I’ll be doing for weeks, but overall everything went fairly smooth. Nevertheless, like any major move, it’s just about guaranteed something didn’t get moved to the right spot or got broken entirely — if you happen to stumble across that something, I’d certainly appreciate a quick note so I can go about fixing it!

No, I have not intentionally gone AWOL again, and don’t plan to be incognito too much longer (or, actually, as long as I have been).

Alas, it’s tax season, by far someone working in [tag]tax[/tag] [tag]accounting[/tag]‘s – in particular, my – most insane time o’ the year, so time is a luxury I don’t have much of…

And even better, it’s late February, and I’m employed in a practice in the rural Midwest, which means just a few days left until all those [tag]farmers[/tag] who owe on their [tag]taxes[/tag] and haven’t paid any estimates can file their returns without getting a penalty tacked on to their bill. And, trust me here, farmers tend to be a tad creative with their bookkeeping methodology, so it generally makes for more work to eek out the requisite information than your run of the mill self-employed individual.

It’s our bread and butter though, and I don’t mind the work or the clients – it’s just the volume that can be insane! Needless to say, scraping the ol’ grey matter for an interesting post or two hasn’t really crossed the mind more than once or twice the last couple weeks, and then only in a “the hell if I’m going drag my exhausted butt up to stare at a computer some more” way. A few 100+ hour weeks tend to do that to a fella…

The end (of this particular segment anyway) is in sight, so look for a bit more activity around here in the not too distant future. But right now, a few hours of sleep beckon…

Stumbled across the most excellent [tag]PHP[/tag]/[tag]SWF[/tag] Charts quite some time back, and made a mental note to play around with it a bit when I had some time.

I don’t necessarily have plenty of time these days – working in an accounting office, and it being between January and April, rarely offers up a heck of a lot of down time – but every now and then, a mental diversion can sure help clear the mind a bit. I somehow stumbled across them again a couple days ago, and thought I’d see what I could throw together quick.

You can see the results in the ‘our [tag]net worth[/tag]‘ [tag]chart[/tag] on the sidebar to the right. I’ll see if I can finagle the info that belongs in the ‘not tracked’ area somehow and get rid of that big ol’ gap (or maybe I’ll just blank last year and start tracking from January). (tracked it down…) Works pretty slick, especially once I applied my own brand of  PHP magic so that it’d be as painless as possible to keep the data updated. I’ll have to do some brainstorming, see what other data might be useful in chart form…

Was just going through this sites stats and stumbled across an interesting tidbit: a full 38% of my referrals from search engines go to my ‘Poor [tag]MBNA[/tag]‘ post (re: their declining revenue because of high customer payments) back in April.

Haven’t used ‘em in forever, but they still send me a bill every month showing that big ol’ goose egg as a balance, along with the ever present handful of ’3.99%-for-3-month and then back to our arbitrary-crushingly-high-interest-rate’ balance transfer checks (I get a packet of these, oh, weekly, as I’m sure you do). Glancing at it tonite (just to make sure nothing shows up on it), I see that my rate is now 24.99%, up from the almost-as-ridiculous 21.25% the last time I bothered checking. (I keep the card merely because it helps with the credit utilization portion of my FICO score.)

So, just to reiterate, [tag]MBNA sucks[/tag].

(And as an aside, anyone know some adsense-foo on blacklisting ads? It’d be nice to remove their ads here, and whenever I mention ‘em, I get lots of them…)

[tags]predatory lending[/tags]

Just a short little aside: if you happen to be a blogger as well as a Firefox user, you might want to check out the Performancing extension – makes entering a new post as simple as hitting F8 and typing away via a nice little wysiwyg form. Looks like it works pretty painlessly with most popular platforms (ala WordPress, Movable Type, blogger.com, etc.). I do wish there was a ‘save as draft’ option just in case I’d want to start a more complicated post at my work machine and finish at home, and it doesn’t like it when you enter your own html code (the ‘< ' get turned into '&lt;' and '>‘ get turned into ‘&gt;’). But so far at least, those are the only complaint I have about it.

At the very least, it’s ease-of-use may just help me avoid six month gaps between posts!

[tags]performancing, firefox, extension[/tags]

Hmmm, about a week without a post. Well, you can’t say I’m being particular inconsistent – irregularity is, well, my hallmark. I’ll work on it, I promise.

So, where have ya’ been Sean, huh? Well, honestly, mostly working too much for this time of the year.

One of my new clients this year is in the process of declaring bankruptcy, and we’ve been back-entering seventeen years or so worth of financial records from a multitude of institutions in an effort to clarify a few things for the courts. Running the various reports & graphs created from this information is just depressing – like watching a train wreck in eeeexxxtttrreeemmmeee slow motion. Just so many bad choices compounding upon themselves. Month after month, year after year, you see him falling further and further behind until he essentially quits keeping track. 54 years old, $2+ million owed to almost everyone, and in the process of losing essentially everything – I can’t even imagine the feeling.

As much as I probably shouldn’t – dug his own grave blah blah blah – I feel incredibly bad for the guy, and am absolutely floored (and more than a little pissed) that institutions continued to extend credit to him despite his obvious dire condition. If there ever was a poster child for motivating me to get my financial house in order, he fits the bill all too horribly well.

‘When the world is a monster
Bad to swallow you whole
Kick the clay that holds the teeth in
Throw your trolls out the door’

It’s awfully difficult to chose the right path to go down when you don’t know where you’re at right now. So before I set any real goals, I should probably figure out where I am today. And that would be as follows, current as of midnight April 1, 2005:

Vital Statistics

• Ages: 34 (mine), 33 (wife), 1 (son)

Income

• My Salary (monthly):
  $4,150.00 (pre-withholding/SIMPLE-IRA)
  $3,148.02 (post-withholding/SIMPLE-IRA)
• Wife’s Salary: $0.00
  (SAHM, at least for the time being)

Checking & Savings

• Joint Checking: $440.66
• ING Savings: $55.00
  (opened this month)

total in checking & savings: $495.66

Debt

• Mortgage: $0
  (currently renting)
• Vehicles: $0
  (all vehicles paid off; all vehicles closing in on or exceeding 100k miles too, so they’re worth about $0 as well!)
• Hospital Bill: $669.15
  (final bit of a very expensive birth)
• Credit Cards
  • MBNA: $1,455.53 (@21.25% – evil bank that arbitrarily raises rates)
  • Chase: $19,328.56 (@13.25%)

total debt: $21,453.24

Retirement

• Wife’s 457 Plan: $24,554.58
  (from previous employer)
• Wife’s PERS: $9,000 [approx.]
  (needs to be rolled over into an IRA since she isn’t vested)
• My ROTH IRA: $100.00
  (account opened this month)
• My SIMPLE-IRA: $747.00
  (account opened in January)

total in retirement: $34,401.58 [approx.]

So, if I’ve got half a clue, that makes:

• Total Assets: $34,897.24
• Total Liabilities: $21,453.24
• Net Worth: $13,444.00

A thought or two…

Quite honestly, we’re really in a helluva lot better shape than I assumed. Not that I’m anywhere near pleased about $20k in credit card debt at those rates, but if push came to shove, we could be out of debt in short order by cashing in our retirement savings (not that I have any plans to do so or anything; just that it could be done if absolutely necessary).

That said, 95% of the basis of that retirement was in place three years ago, with a paltry $847 added since that time (and all that in the last three months). And in a time that we invested so little to the future, we also approximately doubled our credit card debt load. So we definitely need some radical alterations!

Next up: how about a goal or two?

Back not more than, oh, lets say, three or four months ago, I began to get fairly burned out on my normal blog feed diet, consisting largely of PC tech news, a heaping serving of webdesign/css-advocacy on the side, a smattering of daddy blogs (being a first time father of a one-year-old), and the random ‘other’ blog/news site I’d stumble upon (think Metafilter and the ilk). I mean, how many yet-another-IE-exploit / get-Firefox-now / going[been]-to-SXSW / Ruby-anything / Google-anything / hide-from-IE-CSS-hacks / blah-blah-blah posts do you have to read before you go ‘OK. I got it. _Really_. I swear. I do. Move on already…’?

So I unsubscribed from most of my feeds, keeping my favorite general interest, and a barebone group of tech/webdesign, feeds around just in case anything interesting topics (to me) pops up. And started hunting around for something new to fill my info junky’s head.

I stumbled upon 43folders and did a stint as a GTD head, followed along with a ton of GTD feeds, Got some Things Done, and then got restless with what has, apparently, become the search for the perfect GTD tools & applications (hint for the searchers: no such thing – find something that gets the job done, and then get back to doing what needs doing). Not that the process didn’t help me immensely – I’m now pretty damn organized, if I do say so myself, and would suggest the book to anyone in a heartbeat. Nevertheless, the only feed that remains of my GTD days is 43folders.

So, I’m back to too few feeds to, well, feed my head, and off I go searching. I wander through a variety of marginally interesting but short-lived tangents of which I won’t bore you with the details.

And then I stumbled across my latest interest (ok, obsession): the personal finance blog. Somewhere along the lines, I came across a link to MyMoneyBlog, run by a 26-year-old with some pretty ambitious goals ($100k non-retirement net worth by mid-2007 & $1.5m net worth by 55). And as I read along, I realized that, yes, they are certainly ambitious, but definitely not unattainable goals. And realized that this young whippersnapper is eight years my junior and has his financial house in infinitely better shape than myself, and that I should do something about that. Sounds like someThing to Get Done to me (see, told you I got something out of the process)!

I also noticed in my readings, that there is a decided abundance of ‘going to be rich in infancy‘ personal finance blogs out there, while there’s a definite shortage of ‘misspent youth and trying to build their financial house before it’s too late’ ones. So I thought, why not build something like irregularpayments.com for those riding in that particular boat.

More details to come later (Did I mention, first time father? I did? Did I mention first time father with a teething baby? Hopefully he’ll let me take less than a couple days to write the next post! ), but for now, welcome! Grab a seat and we’ll see if I can avoid those rocks…