10/17/07 It’s been a day already. And it’s only 9:30am. I got up early and went out for my walk, took a shower when I got home and made my protein smoothie. I got a call from Julie at the PPWFC. She needed to change my appointment time to 1pm. I told her that would be fine. That gave me time to clean up the kitchen. I have the dishes washing right now. I’m working on laundry too. I’m listening to the DR show while I type.

I called USAA to see if we work on getting our account paid would they put us back in good standing. Nope, they won’t. That’s it. No way to pay it back and get our standing cleared up. Guess that tells me what we need to do going forward. We’ll concentrate on what’s immediate and take care of those things. That means the family loan and the loan on the Jeep. That’s all we need to work on at this time. Doesn’t do any good to try and go back and rectify the situation. Kind of a bummer but I tried. They just won’t negotiate. I know if we’re even a minute late paying our auto insurance or auto loan they’ll cancel us. I’m going to have to stay on top of it. I hope they don’t raise our rates. That would suck.

Maybe I should start checking into other auto insurance companies just in case. I don’t want to be caught without auto insurance. I can go without driving but David has to get back and forth to work every day. And he has his gig down at the arena on the weekends. This financial stuff has turned out to be much more difficult to deal with than I thought it would. It’s amazing how inflexible these companies are. We’ve been with them for 20+ years and they are still giving us a hard time. Paid everything on time up until the house in the mountains fiasco but that doesn’t seem to count for much. Oh well, we’ll get through this somehow.

If DR could get through this kind of situation then we can too. He’s our financial inspiration at this point. ~sigh~ Murphy seems to hit daily right now. Oh yeah, I also called USAA to see if I can make changes to my auto policy and they won’t let me do that either. So I only have liability on my jeep. If anything happens to it and it’s my fault, I’m stuck with no car. If it’s someone else’s fault their insurance would have to pay. Any claim with USAA will probably raise rates or get us cancelled. It’s going to be so nice to have no debt and pay cash for everything we want to buy. It’ll take some time but it will be worth the time it takes to get there. No more worshipping at the FICO altar. I know we can turn this around. I know we can. It’s just going to be hard for a while. ~sigh~

I’m using Joel Maxwell’s allocated spending plan excel spreadsheet. It’s easier to use than Quicken or Money. Quicken is too difficult to use. I like Money better. But I don’t care for it’s budget. So I’ll use Joel Maxwell’s templates. I have November’s printed out already so we can sit down and plan out the budget when the time comes. I’ve already entered the income for November so then we’ll just have to figure out when each bill needs to be paid. There will be five paychecks for David in November and my SS check. That ‘extra’ money will go towards getting a month ahead paying bills. I want to be able to pay next month’s bills with this month’s income. I’m not there yet, but I think I can be ahead in a month or two. I’ll try to work on the BEF too. We need to get that up and going.

Guess that’s it for now. I need to stop thinking for a while.