I understand the logic of the article and I could rationale almost all of his points, but seriously, NO debt is good debt. Debt is BAD, mmm kay?

6 Financial Moves That Sound Good — but Aren’t
1. Applying for a Line of Credit
Yeah, it’s stupid. We all have done it and we end up paying big time. There is always a new thing that must be had, something breaks, or I need it now and I don’t have the discipline to save for it. *I am guilty of all of it*

2. Withdrawing From Your 401(k) or Retirement Savings to Pay Down Debt
Yup, dumb idea. I did it. I cracked under financial pressure and now have $0.00 in my future retirement savings.

3. Choosing Only the Safest Investing Vehicles
How is this a bad financial move? If you buy used *ahem* with cash it is a great idea. You spend less on repairs, less worrying on if your jalopy is going to leave you stranded, and if you resell it it might have some residual value.

4. Avoiding Debt Altogether
Wha What? She can’t be serious can she? Her only examples are taking out a mortgage and student loans for being good ideas. Listen, I have both and they stink. You can avoid student loans by working in college, I didn’t, but if I had a time machine I would go back and do it. I would also rent a HOUSE, not an apartment. No one ever mentions the constant home improvement projects and repairs that are needed once you own a home. The utility bills that go way, WAY up in the winter with the gas prices and the pleasures of raising taxes every year making the home you purchased soon to become borderline not affordable.

5. Cutting Your Variable Spending
I agree here.

6. Paying Off a Major Loan in One Payment
Is she mad? Get that debt out of your life, move on from it. Why keep it around like a little lost puppy? That thing is a %^$#^% leech, a parasite, and wants to kill you

This last little amount before we begin to tackle the auto loan is like a thorn in my side. I know it is there and there is no easy way to get rid of it at this point. We don’t have any more big items to sell and all the small things that we have now, no one really wants. Movies, music, etc. Now it seems it is going to be patience to go the distance. Looking at our budget we have an extra few hundred now to put towards the debt which will allow us to knock out the remaining $3,500 over about 10 months. 10 months is a long time compare to the recent progress we have made, but if we stay the course it will be gone by February 2010.

After it is wiped out we will have $10,000 in an auto loan. If everything remains the same and we roll that extra few hundred dollars into the car payment and include the minimum payment we pay now on the credit card, that will be over $600 a month to pay every month on the loan. We could then have the van paid off by February 2011. Thinking about that as I type would be amazing. A loan we took out for 5.5 years being paid off in less than 2.5 years. Putting this in perspective like this brings back the motivation to up the intensity.

Sunday was my second time working back at my old local pizza shop as a delivery driver. As opposed to last time. I had an enormous plus and that was I did not have to take care of the dumpster out back. I am so glad I didn’t have to do this. I pulled up and there was the giant green monster of a garbage bin, you know the one made of solid steel, just overflowing with rotting leftover food, wet cardboard boxes, giant plastic gallons full of old grease, and empty plastic drink cups from the pub and a bar connected to the same building. The owner of pizza shop also owns the pub and bar. I expected to walk and be told to start out back and beginning picking up, but not this week. This week there was a delivery waiting, calling my name to drive a couple blocks down to a senior citizen apartment building to deliver two toasty bagels with cream cheese, it was ten in the morning with a $1.00 tip.

Not a bad way to start the day and it gave way for such promise in the day. With such a start things were looking up. I spent the next couple of hours prepping food for the week, waiting and hoping for a delivery. I grated cheese, prepped dough, did the dishes, made cardboard boxes and swept before the next delivery. All of those tasks should have intermingled with delivering pizza, stromboli’s, calzones, subs and salads, but alas they did not. All this work was finished within the first couple hours of being there with nothing else to do. By now it was about 1pm with four more hours to go. I had seven more deliveries during the rest of my shift before my final delivery for the day and I am not sure why this always happens, but it is the worst. Not because of the customer, but of my own stupidity. I got lost, lost in a town(the city calls it a city) of maybe 20,000 people. It should be illegal for a street to be separated by a manufacturing building with no indication of such spilt on a map.

As a result of the split I needed to call the customer to get directions and I must have sounded like a bumbling idiot with my “where? What street? No, I don’t know, oh okay, I know where that is.” It took me fifteen minutes to deliver that pizza and it literally was two miles from the pizza shop. The customer was extremely forgiving for my idiocy and was quite generous with the tip. They tipped me $4 and change, my largest tip of the day.

Total miles driven during Sunday’s odyssey: 28.4 miles.

Total amount of tips: $17.84. That averages just under $2.00 tip per delivery. Which is great, but if it wasn’t for the $4.xx tip on the last run the tips would have averaged $1.50. I didn’t get stiffed at all this week.

Is my seven hours of time worth it? It was hard not to focus on just the tip amount and to keep in mind that I do get an hourly wage on top of it. So, every Sunday I work I make about $60. Multiply that by generally four Sundays a month and that is another $240 towards the plasectomy.

Every day goes by and I think to myself, I really need to post on what is going on and then of course life happens. I have time right now and let me start with the big one. The never ending saga of selling our SUV. Where did I leave off? I got the title, let the guy know, and I thought we would do the exchange this past weekend. It turned out that he would be leaving for training on Saturday morning for his work and would be back on Monday night. Today is Thursday, correct? I haven’t heard from him. I called on Monday and left a message on his phone that immediately went to voicemail, no biggie I thought, he probably has it off. We have had great communication thus far and he will give me a call back….won’t he? Tuesday rolls on by and I tried a follow up call that evening, but again straight to voicemail. I didn’t leave a message this time. Wednesday, again I wait. I call in the afternoon and straight to voicemail so I fired off an email to him with no response.

Maybe he is out on training and forgot his charger and the phone went dead or even forgot his phone and then it went dead? Training went long? Walking back from his training? Taken hostage? There could be any number of valid reasons and at this point with how long this deal has gone on it needs to end.

I guess at this point I am beginning to panic that I am about to lose this sale. I cannot fathom as to why I would, the guy gave me $500 of his money to hold the vehicle and to take care of a few things with that money, namely the cracked windshield. He is invested in the purchase of the SUV so I am not really sure why he would just let $500 be tied up in a complete stranger. It’s $500, that is a lot of money. I can think of one thing and one thing only to do with that money, pay down debt. Let me tell you it is burning a hole in my pocket to do so. Ugh….

I will be driving to his place to sign the papers, remove my plates, and scrape off the registration and inspection stickers so he can have it. Aside from the money will receive from the sale by selling the vehicle we will also free up valuable space in our driveway. It is tedious to have to move three vehicles everyday so that the kids can enjoy riding their bicycles and coloring with chalk in the driveway. Not only that, but our insurance will drop about $300 a year and I won’t have to register it again this fall. Our state goes by the weight of vehicle to determine the fee of the registration. That thing was heavy. I think it weighed close to two tons, about 3,700 lbs. That is a lot of weight to shed and and great symbolism of a plasectomy.

How did we do this?
Well, tax season and the accompanying refund has come and gone and that helped out tremendously, a $5,000 refund. The other amount came from cashing out my measly 401k from my previous employer when the market was at 9k. Stupid idea, I know, but the pressure of the debt and a few hundred dollars in a budget shortfall every month left me with little choice. I stressed in agony over that decision for months until I finally bit the bullet and just did it. I am fully aware of the future ramifications of that decision and there is no point in looking back and regretting it now. After the federal and state government withheld its supposed right to take my money, I walked away with another $5,000 to apply to the credit cards. To top it off the other $1,200, well that was selling few things around the house and the minimum payments a month.

I am extremely proud of this accomplishment and I know that if all goes well with the selling of our extra vehicle (hopefully soon) and my new second job that we can bust out the remaining credit card debt within a matter of months. It will nice to know that the amount of bills that were coming in will only be a few instead of the mountain it once was. Trying to juggle several credit card payments was a huge mess and a huge burden to bear.

What are your accomplishments so far this year? A quarter of the year is gone, how are you doing and what are your plans for the remainder?

My first day back after 10 years of not delivering pizza was interesting. There was nothing new about it, not much has changed aside from a few extra items on the menu. I have to admit there was a certain amount of comfort knowing exactly what needed to be done, how it was to be done, and when it was going to be done. I go in, do my job and leave. I had forgotten that the drivers do some of the more unpleasant parts of maintaining the pizza shop. Yesterday I had to clean up the trash that was overflowing around the garbage bin out back. Trash gets picked up on Monday so there is a whole week of now rotting food, broken bottles, and whatever else that may be under the cover flaps of the bin and the now half dumped garbage bags over the asphalt. It had been raining a wet snow/cold rain mixture for the past two days that left the cardboard pizza boxes, half eaten slices, and broken glass a bear to pick up. A dirty job for sure. After this I ran to Staples to purchase replacement ink for the cash register only to find out they open at 11am and not the 10am that everyone thought. No big deal, I would pick that up later on the way back from one of my deliveries.

I made nine deliveries yesterday in the course of 7 hours of working between 10am-5pm and drove 30 miles that day. The guy slinging the pizza said that usually they are much busier, but without a major game on and the weather being much nicer that it had that people were probably just out and about. I made $25 in tips over that 7 hours, I assumed I would make closer to $40-50, maybe next time. If you include my hourly wage and tips I made just over $70 that day. That is $70 more than I had last month and if this happens every weekend for a month that is an extra $300 a month towards the plasectomy. Not an earth shattering amount, but it works. I hope to pick up a few more days or nights during the week to bring in some more money. My goal is to have this pan out to be about $600 a month. At this pace combined with some overtime I intend to pick up from work we should be able to knock out that the remaining credit card and begin to pay down the van.

Leading up to our tax return we were shorting payments to our utility companies, paying late on car insurance, making bare minimum payments to the credit cards to avoid late fees or losing the promotional interest rate, and to top it off we were using credit cards to pay for household items, gas, and quick runs to the store. It wasn’t pretty looking back, however it seemed so much easier. I know it was easier because it wasn’t frustrating, we were not living by cash only. There were never any cash withdrawals from our account, just a quick swipe of the credit card or debit card. I always mentally knew how much money we had in the account (I checked it each day) and that didn’t matter, I had the credit card that was my backup. “Oh, my tanks on empty better fill up….What is that honey? We need diapers? Sure I will stop and pick some up….I don’t feel like cooking, let’s go out!”

It is not like that anymore. I don’t carry a credit card, carry cash only when needed, utilize the envelope system and I cringe at the thought of swiping my debit card. Thankfully when one of us is weak, the other is strong. There are times when we have begged each other to go out to eat and one of us would say NO! No is not something we have said to one another in a long time, our kids hear it every day and now so do we. It is good for the plasectomy and keeps us on track.

The raw emotion of concern, happiness, sadness, and confusion is beyond me. I shouldn’t have been emotionally attached to this card, but I was. So much so I memorized the number, expiration date and the three digit code from the back. I can even remember the first day of applying for the card, being approved, and subsequently its arrival in our mailbox. My wife and I were so excited and we swore we would never rack up the insane amount of credit card debt again.

It was 2003 or 2004 and we were accustomed to getting the Sunday paper to peruse the ads for great “deals.” Wouldn’t you know it, there in that Sunday paper, was a 20% off coupon. 20% off almost anything in store plus new, never before been swiped plastic, equaled pure bliss. With that fresh piece of plastic in hand we strolled down to the local Bed Bath & Beyond or was it Linens n Things? I think it was the former, but I can’t be sure. We were on a mission. We had and still have a dog who sheds his fur as if it is his primary function in life and to not be man’s best friend. He is a long haired black retriever who lived on a white carpet. If you had stopped by at any point during the week you would think that by viewing our carpet we enjoyed the zebra pattern. Our vacuum could not keep up with the hair, it was a cheap $50 model that filled bags and went through belts once a month. I think we spent the same amount on replacements as we did on the cost of the vacuum the first year. Surely this wouldn’t do and Dyson had just come out with their new “Animal” version which I think cost $600 at the time.

The price of the vacuum combined with the 20% off coupon gave us a steal of a deal. We saved over $100 and swiped that card as any new happy go lucky credit card owner could. It has been about 5 years now and I think in a round about way are still paying for this vacuum that now needs to serviced. The attachment hose that runs up the back of vacuum is shredding at the top and although it still sucks up from the bottom, attachments are useless now. I believe it can be replaced with a new $30 replacement hose. It has served us well and managed give us our white carpet back.

We have a 2001 Ford Explorer that since been replaced by our minivan. Looking back I often wonder if maybe we should have forgone that purchase and dealt with 3 kids lined up in the backseat and save $247 a month on a car payment. The reality of it is that we were silly in purchasing the van. However, I have said it before at least I think I have and if I haven’t, I love the minivan. There I said it, as a man, I love the minivan.

The Explorer has 109,500 miles on it and some recent maintenance work and from what I am the engine would last forever and all it does is sit there in our driveway day after day. Our home is small at 702 square feet, but somehow our drive is long enough to accommodate three vehicles. This is nice, except for when you need to play musical cars and then in becomes a major pain in the butt. I have listed the Explorer several times on Craigslist over the past couple of weeks with little interest beyond the scammers who would like to purchase it for their brother/sister/mother/father/dog/cat…you get the idea. I really would like to get as much I can for it and the value according to Edmunds and Kelley Blue Book ranges from $4,000-$4,900. I had it listed for $4,200. I don’t want to be greedy and I don’t want to sell myself short. I look at this as another great opportunity to help out the plasectomy and raise us out of a little more debt.

I have thought about getting an ad up on Autotrader and the cost would be $39 until it is sold. I think that this is a fair deal to get it sold and it would expand my visibility tremendously.

Anyone have any tips on getting this sold quick without selling myself short?