This year has been bananas bonkers. I’ve been teleworking since early March of 2020 and while the situation royally sucks, I’ve managed to make the most of it by conserving money, losing weight, and exercising. I will say that I am coming from a place of immense privilege and I don’t know if I could have done really any of these things without my best friend to help fray the cost of food and for errand running, and my job for allowing me to telework, cutting out all commuting costs.
On January 1, I said I’d start my fitness journey and I’m proud to say that I’ve dropped 30 lbs since then. I’ve stopped eating as many carbs, less junk food eating, calorie counting and then adding in exercising when possible. I bulked up a bit and dropped a bit of fat. Damn proud of myself.
I created a fitness tracker where I could write down all the foods, calories and musings on how my week went. I added a weight meter and an exercise tracker. I posted weekly to keep myself accountable. I didn’t hide bad habits, didn’t beat myself over any slip ups and celebrated the victories no matter how small. When I hit my target weight goal, I’ve let this tracker go by the wayside and am now ‘coasting’. I’m happy with my body shape, my weight and am more knowledgeable about the foods to avoid. I may revisit the fitness tracker if I want to hit a lower weight goal, which involves tracking calories and foods more closely.
With Covid-19 raging, I realized that I could be on the knife’s edge to poverty and immediately everything I could do to pay off all debts. A few years back I had taken out a loan to help pay for expenses which was a terrible idea. The interest rate on this personal loan in addition to my credit card interest rates meant I was constantly in the hole and a metric crap load was paying towards interest. No bueno. I aggressively paid off the personal loan and then tapped into my life insurance cash value to pay off my credit cards in full.
I hated my life insurance because I was strong armed into it by a relative who opted to monetize her family and I was an unwilling victim, however 18 years later of paying into premiums meant I had a decent savings in cash value and in retrospect this worked out great because it meant I had a few thousand waiting to be used. It got me thinking about how I wanted to use my funds in the future, and how to best grow it out. I started talking to a life insurance agent since my aunt no longer works for the company and he very patiently explained how the insurance policy works, where the money goes and how best to progress. Long story short, I moved toward an Indexed Universal Life policy where I plan on dumping all excess cash into it. The way I see it, since I have no credit card debt (really no debt any more), I can shovel the $500 monthly payments that would have gone to the credit card and instead into the insurance policy where it’ll compound interest. In the future, if I am able to keep up with it, the cash value will be enough to pay for a down payment on a house or condo. Dare to dream. But at least it’s on the radar.
Since I’m starting fresh in most ways, I was motivated to track my expenses and begin aggressively saving. I knew I wanted a way to enter in data to populate a spreadsheet that then collated itself and found a really helpful Youtube video on how to set it up. I didn’t want to get buried in data so this Google Forms option helped navigate easily and while there was a bit of prep work, the end result means all I have to do is enter in the date, check the correct category and amount spent. The data gets added to a Google Sheet and in the next page collates the data into the various categories. Pretty rad.
But this was just the start. I wanted to track liquidity should I ever need to tap into an emergency fund. I found videos on how to create and manage sinking funds and I like the idea of incorporating it into the Google Sheet so I can earmark monthly amounts to various different goals, such as a new phone, a weaving loom, expensive leather purchase. I didn’t want to go through the hassle of having multiple bank accounts to handle cash so this earmark system kept things very tidy.
Doing the debt, budgeting reminded me of how terrified I am of money. It’s a fear that I’ve always had and am less likely to ever make peace with. I’ve watched countless videos on people budget, debt snowball versus debt avalanche, Dave Ramsey, etc. I am VERY lucky to have a firm foundation to rely on should things go south and the life insurance policy that had ample cash value to tap into to wipe the slate clean. All things considered, my debt is minuscule in the grand scheme of things.
Moving forward I want to spend a lot of time looking at my expenses, not being ashamed of it, talking openly about it to allow others to talk about this shame.
Again, I count my lucky stars for having a number of resources to take advantage of. With Covid and my constant fear of homelessness, my goals moving forward is fiscal responsibility and saving for the next disaster.
