It's a week in, and I'm feeling more wound up than I was before the party. How is that possible?
Doing all the bookwork. Seeming to be the only one concerned about how dishonesty in interpersonal relationships with customers and inside a friends group can negatively impact revenue (in so many ways.) being the one that delegates responsibility to people who are supposedly my "equals".
I have found myself thinking more than once this week "Jesus, what did I get myself into?"
I am not in school this quarter. I am trying to be positive about it but every morning I wake up, excited for Chemistry class and learning about science, and then remember that I had to take another quarter off. I know that logically, in my head, this was the best decision I possibly could have made for the good of my financial livelihood. But my chest hurts every time I think of Chem lecture, and me, not sitting in it. Even last quarter when things were so flippin' hard, I still didn't feel like I didn't really belong at Western. Now... well... now I do. I know this is stupid so please do not tell me I'm hard on myself or that it's the best decision. I know these things to be true. It still doesn't stop this ache in my chest when I think of what I really want to be doing (teaching) and how long it's still going to take me to get there (at least another 3 years, possibly 4) and how hard it was for me to start school again after being out for 10 years (nigh on impossible) only to drop out now. I know. I know. Stop it.
So, instead, this quarter, I'm going to focus on making the shop strong financially after all our January obligations are paid, and focus on paying off more debt, personally.
The best news I've had in the last 6 months came this last week when John got the letter from the VA that his disability increase had been approved. We've been working on getting this upped for about ever, and when we got the news, it came with a backpay decision of close to 4 grand. We immediately used it to pay off the personal loan we took out to pay for our wedding over 3 years ago (which still had over a thousand on it) and we paid off 2 credit cards completely while cutting a third in half. We paid all our January bills, including rent, and set money aside for savings. Then, a few days later, he got part of his financial aid for this quarter. Immediately, over $1500 went into savings to replenish that account and keep it as a worst case scenario cushion. I wrote a check and mailed it off to one of my largest creditors, a local company. I am hopeful that before June I will have all of that paid off, as well. After bills and getting us over 2 grand less in debt than we woke up, John and I went out for a celebratory breakfast. We talked about how best to use the rest of the money we had and where we could reduce debt with the greatest effect. We are going to go into WECU on Monday and get signed up for the Balance program, which should enable us to work on knocking out some of our bad debt. Who knows? If we can get most of our debt paid off this year, the only outstanding money we owe will be student loans. We may even be able to think about getting a house sometime within the next 4 or so years, which I never thought I'd be able to say.
I did some number crunching last month, and realized that during this year of struggling and scraping by, we still managed to pay off $4000 in debt. That amazes me, that we were able to do so much with so little. Then again, while I like a good pair of shoes as much as the next girl, we decided that since we'd been so good (paying down over $2000 of debt in a morning kinda makes you feel accomplished) we both did a little retail therapy and bought ourselves things that we have been putting off in favor of saving money to pay down debt.
So today, we spent enough money to make me want to throw up, and most of the haul was completely impractical, and I'm feeling some tremendous guilt, but whadda gonna do?
I'll tell you what I'm gonna do. Get some sleep. I gotta be at work, for myself, in like 6 hours.
Whee, I own a coffee shop! Oh, wait.
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