Counting My Chickens

I know I'm not supposed to count my chickens before they're hatched but its part of my planning.

I'm expecting (hoping) a good sized commission at the end of January so I've been planning on what I'll payoff then. I only have $365 left on a CashCall loan that I took out back in June of 2008 so I am planning on paying that off. And I need to payoff one of my smaller credit cards in the amount of $320.

In the meantime I'm struggling to finance my budget for the next week and a half until I get paid again on January 15th. I'm expecting - counting my chickens again - about $700 over the next week and a half but I'm still waiting to get paid for some free lance work I did two weeks ago.

I've been doing some Elance work for a small company and they're late on paying me by about a week. Hopefully it is because of the New Year's Day holiday week that they are late. Also, they asked me to write some new work and resubmit my invoice to reflect the "replacement" work. They wanted half of my work resubmitted with new material. Not that it was bad but because it didn't fit their criteria for what they needed. So I wrote some new documents and resubmitted. Hopefully I'll get paid for that work on Monday (1/5) morning.

Due to that shortfall in the budget I decided to apply for two $250 Pay day type loans. The total $500 in loans will cost me $100 - that is the equivalent of almost three NSF charges that I might possiby incur without the loans.

Good news is that last year I paid about $36K in debt off. I still have another $98.5K to work on in 2009. I hope to get the total debt down to about $60K owed by the end of the year.

It will be interesting to see how I do this year. Hopefully I or my wife will not lose our jobs. I pray that there'll be no big surprises financially this year.

Right now I am late on my $200 car registration and I expect to pay it on January 15th. I did pay for my daughter's community college registration of $270. Have to budget for books though. Maybe about another $270 around mid-January. My son is now paying for his own college registration and books. He's earning his own money and wants to pay his own way. He is in a hurry to save up enough money to move out on his own. It will be weird here when he moves out. Hope it doesn't happen for a long time. Same for my daughter. I really do enjoy having a family and having them here.