I’ll be going to work for about four hours today. There’s a supplemental training class available for anyone who wants to take it. It is supposed to teach you how you should react if a psychotic patient in the hospital attacks you. As I was signing up for it, my friend asked me what it was about. “It’s about four hours of extra work,” I said.
At fifty bucks an hour, it’s about two hundred dollars. Or One-fifty after taxes. All that for sitting in a chair and listening to the person say, “Try not to get hit.”
Next week there is another four hour thing at work, too. It is where you have to go in every year and demonstrate that you know how to use all of the machines that you have been using for the past year. It’s about two hundred dollars, too.
Geez, I can’t wait until this debt is paid off.
I’ve been working quite a bit lately. But now I’m off. Or at least mostly off. I have to go in for a few hours on Tuesday, but after that, I’m off until Friday night. And although it helps the money, it is pretty boring to write about on a blog.
I’ve been playing around with the numbers a bit lately though. I’m wondering if I should pay off the BofA account entirely when my income tax refund comes in next week and then pull the money back out on a balance transfer when I am paying down the AC unit. That way, for the same transfer fee as I will use to transfer the student loans around, I can eliminate the interest that I would have to pay on the current BofA balance, without increasing the amount owed.
Other than that, the new student loan balance posted to my account and I updated the sidebar.
Besides that, the wife has a dentist appointment in the morning. I think she lost a filling.
And now I’m going back to bed. I’ve been working too much lately and I’m just plain tired.
Well, it’s Sunday afternoon now and the payweek is over. I only managed to get 24 hours of work in this week, to be combines with the overtime from last week. I haven’t run the numbers yet. I know that I will be able to easily pay my bills and have maybe a thousand dollars or so left over to put into the debt hole. More or less. At the very least, all I really wanted to be able to accomplish this payday was to get my EF up to $1000 so that I could begin attacking the debt in earnest. I believe that I will get my W2 from work this payday, so I’ll get my taxes in as soon as I can. I expect I’ll get a good chunk back this year, since they took out for a high income the first half of the year and then the last half of the year the income slacked off. My rough estimate is that I should get about three thousand back. But I’ll have to keep my fingers crossed for that one.
Even so, it’s been a rough couple of weeks and I’m realizing that I’m going to have to run this race as a marathon and not a sprint. I’ve heard that said before, and now I understand it. I have such a long way to go and I’m tired already.
Oh well. Whataya do. I just have to keep on keeping on.
At least I’m scheduled off tomorrow. Maybe I can sleep.
I stayed up most of the night so that I could sleep during the day today. That way I’ll be OK to go to work tonight.
The only thing is that my work just called and said that there is a mandatory staff meeting today that is a training thing. I have to go in and do some training for some new policy or other. It will take about two hours. But it’s an hour’s drive to work, so that makes three. Four if I want to come home afterwards. I have to be finished with the training by 4PM. I start work at 7.
That means that if I go in at the last possible minute (get there at 2PM) I will get out at 4:00 and have three hours left until I have to start work.
So pretty much I don’t have time to sleep, and I won’t have time to come home afterwards. I’ll have to find something to do from 4 to 7. (I can’t come home after four because the drive in to get there at seven takes even longer due to rush hour traffic.)
So I’m downloading some movies from DVD to my iPhone (It’s great being a hacker) so I can go watch them in the car after the training thing is over. I’ll go with Office Space and Pirates 3. I can get them down to under 2GB each and still have excellent video, because the screen is so small.
Anyhow, no rest for the weary. But I can tell already that I won’t be able to keep up this kind of schedule long term. My body still hurts from the last time I went to work and it’s already time to go back.
(shrugs shoulders)
I lost some work today over a scheduling mixup.
I’m normally scheduled to work every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. During the week, if they need extra help, I can go in and work overtime.
Today I took a nap, anticipating that I would call and see if they needed extra help. I woke up and was getting out of bed and the phone rang. It was work.
“Oh, good,” I thought. “They do need me.”
But when I answered the phone, they wanted to know why I hadn’t called to confirm my shift. You see, whenever I am scheduled, I have to call in two hours before the start of the shift to confirm that I am working. Being less than two hours from the start of the shift, I normally would have already called and confirmed that I was working. Except that I wasn’t scheduled to work today.
Ok, so I could have just confirmed right then and there, except that I live a long way away from my job. If they are calling you in extra, and ask you to come in after it’s too late to get there on time, they won’t hold it against you that you are late, and in fact, they will pay you for the whole shift, even though you came in a little late. After all, they called you late. It’s not your fault.
But today, they had me listed as scheduled. If I were to decide to just go in as if I actually was scheduled, I would have been late. And being late at my work is not something that is looked upon favorably.
So rather than having a late day on my record (yes, they do keep a record), I told them that I wasn’t scheduled, which I wasn’t.
So I lost a day’s work over it, rather than having a late day. (They REALLY don’t like you to be late at my job)
So now I’m all dressed up and nowhere to go.
But whoever said that life was fair?
I ended up getting canceled for eight hours, giving me a 52 hour week. Not too shabby.
I’m scheduled for Sunday, Friday, and Saturday this week now, for 36 more hours. I’ve already asked them to call me if they need anyone for overtime. But even if I don’t get any OT at all the second week of the pay period, I’m in good shape right now.
Unrelated to that, I added a page under the ‘Menu’ tab above to keep track of all of the cool things that I DIDN’T buy while I am getting out of debt. Things that I REALLY want to buy, but passed on.
And since I started River of Debt on the first pay period of the year, I think it would be handy to keep a simple log page of how much $$ went toward debt each payday.
I’ll start that up later in the week though, when I have more time/brainpower.
For right now, I think I’ll just go to bed.
I made it through another night. These long hours at work really suck. But tonight will be the final night of the pay week. If I work tonight without getting canceled, I will have pulled off a sixty hour week. That’s really amazing to me, since before Christmas I was averaging only twenty or so hours per week. Sometimes less than that.
I ran some rough numbers through my head (yes, I’m a number geek) and if I just finish out the pay period without any more overtime at all, I should still be able to pay off a couple of thousand dollars of debt in one paycheck.
But it’s too early to go counting the chickens. Right now I’m just trying to get through this stretch of work. I’ve done two days out of a four-in-a-row on my schedule. Two down, two to go.
After that, I’m scheduled off for four days. But the way it’s been lately, they may want me to work one or more of those days. The hospital is full of people with the flu, and the nurses are all out sick with it, too.
So I want to get while the gettin’s good. If I were to pick up a couple of extra shifts during the week, I could easily increase my debt payment to three thousand dollars this paycheck.
But I’m counting chickens again, ain’t I?
I need to quit doing that.
After working on my budget for most the the day yesterday and updating the blog along the way, I managed to get a nap for a half-hour. And then I went to work for twelve hours. I managed to make it through the night without falling asleep on the job. Or at least without falling into a really deep sleep.
The pay week ends after Saturday’s night shift is over. Or rather, on Sunday morning at 7 am.
I’m regularly scheduled to work on this Friday and Saturday, so if I can make it until Sunday morning without getting canceled, I will have cemented in the overtime that I have worked this week.
In the meantime, I am adding up my debt totals. It’s a daunting task. I’m not too sure that I want to know the total.
But I know I need to do it so that I can figure out what to pay off first once I get my EF up to $1000.
But I’ve still got two more weeks until Payday #2 of 2008, and I intend to play with it more when I’m not so sleepy.
I have several competing ideas about what to pay off first. Of course, Dave Ramsey says to pay off the smallest to largest. This has the benefit of giving you some extra motivation to start with when you see the smallest debts go away quickly. I don’t know if I want to do that. Some of my credit cards have high balances compared to their limits, and one thing I am considering is to pay them all down to under 40% of their limits so that my credit score won’t take such a hit. Not that I particularly need a high credit score. And by paying them all off, it will go up eventually on it’s own.
But then I have the idea of paying off the ones with the biggest monthly payments first. Then I will have more disposable income that can go into my debt snowball. But again, if the payments are high, they will pay off faster just by making the minimum monthly payments. A case in point is the student loan. I am paying over $800/mo on it. If I pay it off quickly, I can roll that $800 into the next debt. But by paying such a high payment on it, it will be paid off this year even if I never add to it. So I could be paying off other things in the meantime and let it get paid off just by making my normal monthly payments.
And then there is the option to pay off the ones with the higher interest rate first. Mathematically, that makes the most sense. But only to a certain degree. If I pay off the highest interest rates first, I will save some money in the long run by paying lower interest on the ones outstanding. But paying off the lower balance ones first would increase my debt snowball faster and then the higher interest rate ones could get paid off faster. Maybe.
And then there is the option to pay off the most inconvenient ones first. I have one that I can’t pay online. I have to write a check and mail it every month. That is a major pain. I always have trouble finding stamps. And then if I want to make an extra payment to them on the paycheck that I pay my house on, I have already sent off the pre-printed envelope and it makes it hard to have to wait until next month when I want to pay it off now.
But then there is the option to pay off the car first, because no matter what, they will never repossess the dinner that I charged on the credit card. If something bad were to happen, I would have the car paid off already and the car is what takes me to work every day.
And then there is the choice to pay off the highest interest rate ones, and then save the money that I would have sent in to the lower interest rate ones, and draw more interest than they charge. And then when I have enough, pay them all off in one fell swoop.
I’m open to suggestions here, if anyone has some wisdom to share.
But for now, I’m going to bed.
My work just called me and they want me to come in and work another 12 hours of OVERTIME. How can I say no? If I can make it through Saturday night without getting canceled, I will have gotten $1200 in OVERTIME this week. Not this check. This week. There is still another week left in the pay period.
If I don’t collapse from exhaustion.
