Debt $ense

Starting in June, my weekly payments are increasing $32 ($20 for withholding, $12 for dropping broadband). That takes me up over $700 a month in payments - a nice round number. I’m hoping to hit $800 a month in July after my raise kicks in, but I won’t know for sure until my review next week.

If I just keep making the new weekly payments - no extras, no increase with my raise - my CC will get paid off by mid-March. That’s better than my original date - the end of August next year - but still a few months shy of what I’d like.

Still, I’ve increased my weekly payments by almost $50 in two months. If you’d told me I could do that, I would have laughed. And yet I haven’t really missed many of the things I’ve cut in the name of debt reduction.

The raise is the one last major change I can make in the weekly payment this year, barring an unusual lifestyle change. Now I need to focus on finding new income streams, either for ongoing income or one-time chunks (like a yard sale).

The paper-editing is one I need to move on. If I can design a flyer this weekend, I can start posting it on campus next week or the week after for summer session students.

I’m also going to try a slightly different take on the card-making option and see if the city parks and rec department would be interested in me teaching classes in the fall. That would let me make some money from teaching, plus build word-of-mouth about the cards and hopefully sell some that way. The county offers similar classes and they have so many I assume they must be popular. I could teach them how to make one card with maybe one or two variations, and give them the supply list if they want to replicate the card at home to make more than one. I’ll have to e-mail the person in charge of the classes Tuesday and see if that’s an option. That means spending part of the weekend designing and making cards in case they want to see some.

My goal is to be able to make one extra payment each month equal to my weekly payments, but that means finding another $50 a week, on average. Let’s see if I’m up to the challenge.