Debt $ense

Six weeks ago, when I got serious about attacking my debt, I created an Excel spreadsheet to track my weekly payments, finance charges and running balance.

Originally, I had several sheets to try different scenarios, which let me see which changes made sense and which didn’t. After I had settled on a plan, I deleted those sheets.

Now I’ve got almost as many: my original plan, what’s actually happening, my aggressive scenario, my 401(k) results and predictor of future performance, and now my post-debt savings scenarios. I can easily kill several minutes a day using those to run numbers over and over. *RME* I’m such a geek.

On the plus side, it makes it easy to evaluate possible changes. And the post-debt savings sheet - today’s addition - really highlights how much money I’ll free up once I have this debt killed. That’s a powerful incentive to keep going.

At the same time, I often have to remind myself not to spend too much time playing with the numbers. At the moment I can’t do much to change them, so there’s a limit to how much productive fiddling I can do. About all I can evaluate is how different annual raise results will affect things, and that just makes me think too much about something I can’t really affect at this point. (Too close to the review date - the paperwork likely has already started.)

Too much time with the numbers is almost as bad as too little, I think. After a while, the time I’m spending running scenarios is time that could be better spent finding ways to increase my income. I have two tracks I’m working, but both have a seasonal component and I’m not quite there yet. Summer session at the college won’t start for another few weeks, and craft fairs are several months off. I do need to start creating the stuff I’m going to sell at the fairs, though. Instead, I’m running numbers.

I guess I should set goals for the upcoming week for both tracks. For the paper editing, my goal is to create a flyer to distribute and an e-mail alias on my main account. For the notecards, I need to design six to eight versions and figure out how long it will take to make sets and how I can package them. I also need to price supplies so I know what kind of savings there are from buying in larger quantities.