like i promised last time, i am going to blog about our debts! i am not glad to blog about it just so i have something to blog about. i wish we didn't have any at all. in fact, i stress myself out thinking of paying them completely sooner rather than later.
car loan:
we have a $10K car loan that we started paying in Dec 2006. our fortnightly payment is about $108 but for a number of months this year we paid $400 fortnightly, which brought our debt significantly down. we are now down to $6k. we had to stop increasing our payments to $400, and stick to $108 in the meantime, because i wanted to pay off our credit cards ASAP.
hire purchases:
we have 2 - for a 42" LCD tv and for a sofa set. we pay the tv $145/month and sofa is due $60/month. i pay the sofa $120/month because it doesn't hurt to pay that extra $60 in the overall budget. as for the tv, i can't add more because it's on auto-debit. both are on interest-free for (i think) 2 years.
this holiday season is not as expensive as the previous ones. we decided to give chocolate brownies this year, which i will bake. i'm not gonna be disappointed if my partner chooses not to buy me a present this year, just because i know we're better off paying our debts. in all honesty, i think our debts are controlled. the fact that we can afford to pay more than the minimum and still stash away 15% to savings and not really tighten our belts mean that we're doing well. it's just i would rather we don't have debt at all!
i had planned to pay the leftover amount of our budget before the next pay day to credit card debt. the circumstances in the previous week have changed and left me with less than $100 for 2 more days. we bought a second-hand sterilizer and breast pump set (cash, $73 but goodbye to additional $20 that my partner "stole" when he withdraw from the atm), paid for air fare (cash, $261) for joining my spouse's conference last month, grocery ($130 roughly), our Christmas brownies ingredients and packaging ($126 roughly), and some other needed bits.
lately i can't help but get annoyed (and a bit stressed) about my partner's financial mindset. he has in his mind of purchasing a bigger external hard drive. we now have an 80GB one but it's all full now and he wants to expand to maybe 250GB. it's not a need and he knows that, that's why he said he will save his allowance to get himself a bigger drive. i appreciate that, but at the same time i can't help but wonder why he talks to me more about the cash flowing out instead of finding ways to keep them from flowing out. last year he bought himself an iPod Nano. when the iPod Touch came out, he immediately got himself one without plans of re-selling his old unit. i am pushing for the selling and will get it on an auction site this week. i was frustrated that i am the one doing the selling instead of him being the owner.
i can't help but think of his childhood and how his financial life had been before living with me. he grew up poor and hardly had money in the bank. when he got his tax refunds, he straightaway thought of buying himself a dvd recorder and ipod touch. now he doesn't like and want the dvd recorder anymore, after nearly 6 months, and wants to sell it. his mindset is about giving himself what he deserves because he didn't really have much growing up. why doesn't he think saving for the future is a good thing that he deserves in life? i don't know. if somebody could shed light on this, please tell me. i am not saying he constantly spends. he actually lets me control our money and gladly lives off on fortnightly allowance of $150. i just wish that for now he stops thinking of gadgets and whatever to get. the other day he suggested that we buy a sandpaper machine because we're going to sand a second-hand drawer for the baby. we have sandpaper at home and i didn't think we need to get a machine since we have enough time to do it anyway. i thought we didn't need to buy one for a small drawer job. his thought was that machines do it faster, therefore would save us time. living in this part of the world has significantly slowed our lifestyle pace. we always have time.
saving 15% to me is not enough because i know, for certain, that if we are out of debt we could save more. i just wish my partner could really see things from an asset-vs-liability perspective.
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