Tag: money

Year In Review – The Highs and Lows of Financial Catastrophe

Dave JohnsonLeave a comment

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I promise you’ll hear more from me in some form in 2020. I plan on doing even more blog updates, and I’m 3-4 chapters into writing a book that I’m starting to feel really good about. I don’t know jack sh*t about getting a book published, but I knew even less about responsibly managing my finances and I figured that out, so what do I have to lose?

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If you had talked to me in early 2019, I would have told you that we were losing our house. I would have also told you that we were struggling to figure out how to pay our bills, or even keep food on the table. As fully-grown adults in our 40s, my wife and I had manage to make almost every poor financial decision possible, and were now faced with crippling debt.

We formed a plan over January and the first part of February, and all of the math showed that we would nothing short of a small miracle to escape our predicament. We knew which things to pay and in which order, but if even the smallest thing went wrong, we were in some serious trouble.

We focused every single resource we had at the problem, and we sacrificed as much as possible, sometimes resorting to eating just Four Eggs a night. All the while we hid the family from everyone but our closest friends and family (and the readers of this blog), and we wallowed heavily in guilt and remorse.

I try not to exaggerate for the sake of exaggeration, so trust me when I say that it was the worst time of my life. As always, perspective is key, so I’m sure there are some of you that have gone through far worse, but for me this was the low point.

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FUN FACT: The previous low point was explaining to my Mom that in order to pull square with the Columbia House cassette tape club, she was going to need to help me purchase 300 cassettes in the next 11 days.

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I really couldn’t see any kind of light at the end of the tunnel, and it sucked big ginormous bags of ding dongs.

What a difference a year can make…Read More »

Today was a Good Day

Dave Johnson1 Comment

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We’ve learned many lessons this year, among them how to actually appreciate and value the things we purchase. It has made us a stronger family unit, and it has helped to instill values in our children that will hopefully help them in life for many decades to come.

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At the beginning of 2019, my wife and I were in a really bad spot. We owed an insane amount of money on credit cards (6 figures), and we were making $3600 a month less than what we needed to pay our bills. We had no savings, we had very little in our 401k, and we were almost certainly going to lose the house we had bought just 6 months prior.

We committed to solving our debt crisis once and for all, and we knew that part of doing that meant we had to set some really large stretch goals to keep us honest and aggressive in our efforts.

I told my wife, “We need to set a big number in terms of the debt we want to pay off this year, and it needs to be large enough to frankly make us uncomfortable.”

We set our golden number for the year at $50,000.00. Fifty-thousand. A FIVE, AND THEN A BUNCH OF ZEROS. That was a stupid number, and there was probably no way we would come close, but damn if we weren’t going to try!

When I have set similar lofty goals in the past, it has rarely worked out well…

Dave at age 10:
Goal: “I bet I can jump this canal on my bicycle!”
Result: Broken bike, broken bones.

Dave at age 22:
Goal: “I bet I can beer bong this entire 5th of whiskey!”
Result: Waking up in that same canal, wondering what happened to my pants.

Dave at age 35:
Goal: “I bet I can put a flat screen TV in each room of my house!”
Result: See paragraph 1 of this post.

So needless to say, I was somewhat pessimistic about the financial goal I had set for us to achieve, and I had a lifetime of results (or lack thereof) to back that pessimism up.

And yet today, a month and a half early in fact, we hit our goal.Read More »

This One Tip Will Get You Out of Debt and to FI Faster Than Any Other

Dave JohnsonLeave a comment

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By spending less, you’re “eating better.” You’re not wasting your money on dumb purchases that you really don’t need, just as you aren’t filling your face hole with Ding Dongs and lard.

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I have done a LOT of research over the past 10 months. I have read books and blogs, listened to podcasts, attended seminars, watched YouTube videos, and met with one incredibly trustworthy and knowledgeable financial planner.

Here are just a few of the books I’ve read:

  • Rich Dad, Poor Dad
  • Start Late, Finish Rich
  • The Automatic Millionaire
  • The Millionaire Next Door
  • The Simple Path to Wealth
  • I Will Teach You To Be Rich
  • The Latte Factor
  • The Total Money Makeover

Podcasts I have (or continue to) listen to:

  • Bigger Pockets
  • Choose FI
  • Motley Fool
  • The Money Guy Show
  • Mr. Money Moustache

You get the idea.

I have spent the better part of a year listening, absorbing, planning, and evaluating how to get out of debt, and how to get on the road to financial independence once and for all. It’s why I’ll pay off over $50,000 worth of debt this year alone, and it’s why I have a plan to be totally free of credit card debt by the end of 2020.

In the process of doing this, I think I’ve hit on something big that I want to share with all of you. Once I understood it, it changed my life totally, and given me the understanding of the mindset I need to really achieve my goals.

The one thing you need to do to pay off debt and achieve financial independence is…

Read More »

Being in Debt Does NOT Make You a Dumb*ss. Staying in Debt DOES!

Dave JohnsonLeave a comment

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My ability to attain a relatively successful career meant that I probably wasn’t a flat out dumbass, regardless of what my wife might lead you to believe. My inability to manage personal finances, however, meant that I was undoubtedly ignorant in regards to the subject.

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I was the first male in my family to graduate from high school. Truth be told, I had a half-uncle who graduated high school about 6 years before me, but I’m choosing to ignore that to make for a better story.

Side Note: Yes I said my uncle graduated high school six years before me. My grandfather re-married very late in life and had a child with his new bride. Don’t ask, folks… it’s Smalltown, USA.

So like I said, I was the first male in my family to earn my high school diploma. My dad dropped out either his Sophomore or Junior year, and I’d be surprised if my grandpa made it much past the 8th grade. They were taught that school was for chumps, and the moment you had identified a career, schooling had served its purpose.

Yet both my father and his dad were incredibly bright. My dad still has an amazing knack for Marketing, even though I doubt he’d know that is what it’s actually called. He knows he’s good at “selling people stuff,” but could give two sh*ts about the terminology or psychology behind it. Both he and my grandfather started highly successful businesses, despite their lack of formal education, and both took chances that I to this day don’t have the courage to take.

So I didn’t have a lot to live up to in terms of expectations. If I had dropped out of high school early, I’m sure my parents would have been slightly disappointed, but it wouldn’t have been the end of the world.

While my older sister blazed through both high school and college earning a 4.0 degree at both along the way (along with things like Class Valedictorian, President’s lists, scholarships, and the like) I maintained a rock solid 2.5 GPA, mostly due to sports and… well… not really caring about school.

Again… I didn’t have much to live up to.

I did manage to graduate high school, and then attended one year at university, dropped out thanks to a job offer from my father, and later in life returned to get a degree and several certificates. In all, I’ve probably completed around 6-7 years of post-high school schooling of some kind, and now have a successful career in videogames.

Take that, weirdly-young half uncle!Read More »

When Trying to do the Right Thing Financially Bites You in the Ass

Dave Johnson1 Comment

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If you make it to the bottom of today’s post, there is a reward for you! True story.

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My wife and I are in the process of refinancing our house. When we bought the home a year ago, it was about as painless of a process as buying a home can be. There was some grunt work on our parts, but by and large it was what you would expect; chasing down bank ledgers, getting statements, providing numbers, signing papers, etc.

This year we wanted to refinance. It has only been a year, but the interest rates have dropped enough that it meant freeing up some cash each month that we could then focus on debt in the short term, which was critical given our situation.

What we have found is that the process of refinancing has been FAR more imposing than the original purchase. Not only has it taken months of work to make it happen, but it has also required me to provide what seems to be the same information several times over.

At a certain point in the refinance process, I was also working on getting some debts consolidated at a much lower interest rate (%29.99 > %13.99), but before I did this I asked our loan officer if this would affect anything. I was told it would be fine, since my credit rating was already verified and the interest rate of the refinance was locked.

Smash cut to Thursday morning when I got a call from the same loan officer asking me why there was brand new debt on my profile. I remined her that it was the consolidation loan, and here response was, “Well, Dave, you personally took this debt consolidation loan out, and when you had originally asked me about it, I thought it was to consolidate your own debt. Instead you used it to pay off debt that was in your wife’s name, hence it now shows as new debt on you, and thus we probably can’t secure the loan for you at this time.”

Let’s unpack this for a moment:Read More »