This story is actually really long. I'll try to keep it down as few paragraphs as I can.

Short of the long: I use to make a ton of cash, almost $10K+/week. Went down to making $2k/week then $2k/month. Wife got an education, then we went back up to making around $10K/month. Simple. When we were making all that cash, we spent it all. Didn't save. (In hindsight, I know what I should have done with almost $600k, but I didn't, it was dispersed out over many months.) Now that we are (almost) leveled out, it seems that $120,000/year isn't good enough to get by? Whaaaaat? Well, the math is simple. We've gotten ourselves into debt, that is decreasing quickly. One problem. I don't work, as most of you know. I've said before, if someone can't live off of $100K+/year, they're stupid, right? Well, I can...except when my wife misses work. In order to keep this as painless as possible, I'll explain it quick n easy.

1: Her Sister died, she was 48.
2: Her Grandmother died, she was 80something.
3: Her Grandfather died, he was 90something.

All 3 of these hit within a 2-3 month period. Not to mention, that while I was in Las Vegas, my step-mother had died, and her funeral was happening then. (While I was getting good and drunk with Purple Dildo, worth it though, I hated that bitch!) Generally, I plan ahead for things. I like to know what I'm about to have to spend money on. Well, I did for the Las Vegas trip, but I never planned ahead for all those people being dead and my wife having to take off work. Poor planning, right? She missed out on around $14,000 during that time. I had to juggle shit around like a whore in church to make sure the ends met.

I've (been trying to) take measures to make sure that I don't have to worry if we miss out on money by bringing in cash that was held up elsewhere. (Was suppose to be savings) I've also gotten rid of some stocks to reduce our bills so we only owe on three different things. Our two cars and our house. WELL - We also have to pay cell phone, Dish Network, Internet, gas, groceries, smokes, (because we both smoke) liquor, insurance on our cars and anything else that comes up during the month. Those few bills, after, WELL, equal around $1,000/month. So what I've been trying to do is get all of my bills paid off so I only owe the house and all the little bills. That way when the wife makes a check, I pay the little bills then the house. Easy? Right?

So - I'm up to a $1,000 savings, again, and I'm looking to pay off the durango very shortly, 2 months maybe? The other car will be payed off when I make sure everything else is clear, then I'll have that one payed off by June or so.

This isn't my idea or how I usually do things, it's actually Dave Ramsey.

I do everything except the god part in his layout, it's pretty sound. I don't believe in god, so I don't follow that part of his advice, but I do follow the rest as close as possible. http://www.daveramsey.com

If, however, I would have followed his word, to the tee, from the start, my bills would already all be paid off. I didn't, I did my own thing. (Or actually, my wife did) In the end, I sold my trailer house, got a regular house and got rid of some of the things he said I should. Still better off, much better.

Where I almost got into trouble was paying off our huge credit card debts. (notice the S in debts?) - Yet I wasn't able to pay all the credit cards at once, so I waited 2 weeks, Weeeeellllll, 2 weeks to a credit card company = $70.00 worth of charges, which my dear wife didn't understand which almost got us into deep shit that all of n00bfest wouldn't have been able to dig us out of with snow shovels. Deeper than deep!

Best advice from me? Buy Dave Ramseys book and follow his advice, if you're not a believer in god, don't follow that part but follow the rest. Do follow everything else, it really works.

Love, Coach

See you guys soon, still a bit of work to do, woo!

Debt sucks. I'm glad the only debt I have is my house, and even then... half of that is Strange's problem.

I have some related advice. Don't count on anyone else financially.

As a lot of you know I was living with my "wife" (never actually got married, but she was a wfe to me) for about 5 years. After 3 of those years I decided to move forward with our lives together and purchase a home for us, which would lead to me proposing when I had saved u pa bit more. The smart thing I did was to model my mortgage based ONLY on my own income. But I didn't truly think that would be necessary. Unfortunately, I never planned on her leaving or that my employer would decide to move me to a new sales team and I would end up making about $1000 less per month.

It's been over a year since she left, but all my savings are gone and I had to take a loan out from my 401k to make sure I could pat the bills. That money is about to run out. I'll be OK though. I cut some bills and waiting for the title company to get back to me on my mortgage refinance. It will save me about $300/mo. There is still a small chance I my be getting a new job also that will be another $25k/yr :)

We all want good things in life, but I promise that it's important to plan carefully and make consideration for things that might end up setting you back. Give yourself some cushion.

This reminds me of C.R.E.A.M.


Good luck buddeh

The moral of the story being "Don't marry a woman who is going to go to funerals and miss work." Also never finance anything that depreciates in value and if you consider it, just cut a few inches off your dick instead since they're both basically similar concepts.

I wanna know how you were making $10k a week.

Question #2: What did you blow all your money on?

I could buy every firearm I ever wanted and still not spend that much money. Not to mention, my $100k student loan debt would have gotten payed off pretty easily. It will literally take me a lifetime to pay that back.

100k? Holy Christ I love Canada.

How to spend my money properly is my big problem. As soon as I starting having a lot in my pockets, I forget about the future, and start buying shit I can afford on the moment, but right when I need to pay my car and the appartment, I almost die inside because I know I fucked up. Happens everytime, really gotta fix that.

That sucks coach but at least you know whats going on and how you can fix it and what to do to fix it. Just good luck with the debts they can be a real pain in the ass ;)

I feel you on the student loan fails. I have 60k to pay back plus my car note and the normal living expenses. It makes me sad to see all my money go out almost as soon as it comes in. On the plus side i have the max being put into my 401k each year so at least a portion of it is going towards my future. In short F*CK work I need to find a way to create passive cash flows so i can work less.

10k/week was easy here. We had a nursing agency where we sent people out to work and got paid about $10/hour for getting the position filled. That's $10/hour/person. So, if we sent out 5 people for an 8 hour shift, we made $50/hour. At our peak, we had anywhere from 20-25 people working around the clock. We did have a few weeks where we had around 40 people working in the hospital. In retrospect, I think that was our demise, we grew too quick and had too many people out and ignorant floor managers got pissed that they were having to pay our agency to keep the place staffed.

Or, another way of putting it -

I was a pimp, people called and needed services, I got bitches to do work and made a part of their profit. Heh.

As to the second question: I don't think we really blew the money. We spent around $30k on some decent ass furniture that'll last us till we die then it all can be passed down. We spent $20k on the aforementioned trailer house down payment, that we lost our ass on (when we sold), then had a really small loan on it, like $30k or so. We spent $10K on a truck down payment that later got repoed when the business failed. We took a few trips, nothing too expensive, but when you don't have to worry about a $50 purchase, we didn't.

The rest, well we spent on getting different stuff done to our house, bought some appliances, what nots n shit. The post I made in the other forum about the dude that blew all that cash comes from experience. I never saw an end to our business, so I didn't plan ahead. I do now.

In fact, at that time, I told my wife that I could buy some gold bullion from the local gold place for around $260 per ounce. I just wanted to buy around 2 1/2 lbs of it and let it sit. It would have cost me about $10,000. Gold is now worth $1719.00 (or so) per ounce. I could have made a pretty decent profit by now - or just keep holding on to it for a while and wait out the market. What'd we do instead? We bought the furniture mentioned above. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Blowing money is easy when you're young and never had it. Saving it is easy when you're older and know where it should go.

Thanks Coach, I appreciate the response.

I understand better what happened now. Your temp agency gig sounded like a pretty sweet deal.

I'm guessing you won't be making the same mistake twice.

GATORS BITCHES BETTER BE USING JIMMYS

I actually listend to Dave Ramsey when I was out of town for a year of college and he seemed to have a lot of good ideas to get out of debt, it's not easy, it's eating canned beans and Ramen on some nights and always the urge to go back to the lifestyle you used to live. I'm not saying all this from experience just from what I heard so I'm not going to try to give advice since you seem to have gone to a source that I have heard many times they call up his radio show to yell "I"M DEBT FREE!!!!" *the sound of William Wallace yelling "FREEEEDDOOOOMMMM" plays in the background*

Anyways... good luck our good ole One Eye Guy