Winter Wallop Waiting

The warmer weather has been a nice respite, but I know what lurks just beyond the weather forecasts . . . real winter, that’s what.

I am enjoying the moderate weather now for January and February are coming.

I know that the days of daytime highs in the mid teens (below zero Celsius) and overnight lows in the mid to low twenties (yes, also below zero Celsius) are coming.  

I know what to do and how to handle those days. (Mostly just bundle up and hibernate.) 

The added trick of keeping your water in smaller metal containers is also good. That’s so you can put it on the stove to melt it . . . but I digress. 

The point is that I am doing my best to accept the nice weather now, because I know that colder weather is coming. 

We are not out of the woods yet, we haven’t even gotten to the thickest part of the woods yet. 

The point today is to find ways to enjoy the day while you can. I am still living cheaply and still not doing much, but I am trying to find the positive in each day.

As always: Keep your head up, your attitude positive and keep moving forward!

I’m Not Alone, It Seems

I saw a news article today that said that fully employed professionals are having a hard time making rent.

Gee, who would have figured that the metrics that drove me to abandon renting have started to catch up to others as well?

There are many who say that if you can’t make ends meet, that is a failure on your part. To a certain extent this is true. 

The answer to a fiscal crunch is usually to downgrade your lifestyle. Yet, what do you do when the whole rental market (or real estate market) has gone insane with stupidly high prices?

You can only cut back so far before you are paying way too much for too little or you chuck it all in and leave, or move in to an RV (like me).

We as a society cannot ignore the fact that the cost of living is rising much higher than wages. This has been happening for so long now that when mentioned it is just shrugged at.

Perhaps we are starting to see a major problem being exposed when (I would hazard a guess) that a healthy portion of our society are house poor.

That means that the lion’s share of any income they take home goes to just existing. 

Am I the only one who sees the crash that is inevitable as the vast majority of our society stops all non-essentials? (As in rent, food, utilities and transportation.) 

Maybe it won’t get that bad tomorrow, but if this trend keeps happening, I will have a lot of company on the streets. 

Maybe I will have to found that “Economic Refugee Camp” after all. 

As always: Keep your head up, your attitude positive and keep moving forward!

Aim For The Stars, Hit The Moon

Okay, so I am now two paydays away from the end of the year. Time has just flown by. I now have a good idea on how my progress on my end of year goals is coming along. 

To make a long story: short, not great, but not terrible. I will achieve 3 out of four of my goals and only miss the last one by a couple of hundred bucks.

Thankfully, this last target is a savings target and just arbitrary number that I decided on. It will not affect anything in the long term. 

The point is that even though I have made my major goal of Total Debt Freedom, I still have goals that I work towards.

If you do not have goals then you are not going to go anywhere. I know this from experience, trust me.

I set goals that I see as a small challenge and work towards them. If I miss them, I get frustrated but I move on. 

What I also do is to take a moment to look back at what happened. I look at what I was able to achieve, rather than what I was not.

When you miss a goal that you have set, make sure to look at what you have done, rather than what you haven’t. 

Still set goals, still work towards them, for even if you miss you will be further ahead than you started. (And that is something to be proud of.)

As always: Keep your head up, your attitude positive and keep moving forward!

On An Upward Path

When you are at a low point, it is important to take a moment to look at what you are thinking and why. 

For it is only when you pause to take a look at your thought processes that you can see how ludicrous some of them are. 

It is funny how we can think certain things, yet not really know it. They sorta happen automatically, behind the scenes. 

Such was the case for me. While I won’t go into details, but I will say that I am, starting at least, on an upward path. 

I am learning more about myself, what I want, along with what I find acceptable. 

There are always ways to improve myself and my life. I would also love to have my plans accelerated, but that will not happen anytime soon; I have come to accept this.  

I seem to need to keep relearning the lesson of refocusing one’s mentality and outlook to a positive one. Let’s hope this time, this lesson sticks.

On another note, while I am not happy being single, I am content. I refuse to accept just anyone into my life, as I know what I am looking for and will accept no less.

This may sound arrogant, but it is just simply practical and, let’s face it, humane for all concerned. 

After all, what is the point of getting involved (with anyone) just to leave them not long after, all because they were not what you were looking for in the first place. 

I will be fair and saying that I do not exactly have a throng of women beating my door down, (not that I ever did). 

This change, however, is within me, and once again, it is within my outlook and how I see the world, and women. 

I am simply happy to be on this upward path, and look to climb ever higher as I continue towards my goals.

As always: Keep your head up, your attitude positive, and keep moving forward!

A Work In Progress

It is now just over a month from the day that I achieved a great goal: Total Debt Freedom. 

This is a large accomplishment, and something that I should be proud of, and I am.

Yet, I have not relaxed, and this is not entirely due to the fact that I am now focussed on my next and larger goal, but rather due to echoes of the past.

I am still in Survival Mode. I am still weary of my precarious fiscal position and still vulnerable to a number of fiscal shocks. 

I am not settled and I am certainly not at ease. I am better off than I was, but I am still trapped on the hamster wheel of working for existence.

I have not broken the cycle of crisis and debt; not yet, but I will. 

Yet I also find myself battling the scars of a life of: privation, failures and dashed dreams . . . grand dreams at that.

I find myself battling: cynicism and futility.

I trudge forward because that is all I know how to do. 

I know that I will slowly see things getting better in my life and slowly the double act of dread (cynicism and futility) will drop away.

We can get taught what to expect by the repetitive outcomes of our past endeavours. This can be for good and bad; I have seen both. 

I will carry on, and I will endeavour to change my outlook and bring hope, real and true hope back to my life and outlook. 

In time my successes will mount and my hope and confidence in the future will mount as well. For now, it is enough for me to recognize that I am still gripped by the past.

I will endure, I will trudge on; always trudge on. 

As always: Keep your head up, your attitude positive, and keep moving forward!

Networking Night Out

No, this wasn’t a throwback to the “LAN parties” of a few years ago, this was a business networking event that I felt a bit out of place at.

For one, I had no business cards to either hand out or put into the various draw bins. For another, everyone kept asking about what my business was.

The little devil on my shoulder (in the form of a certain friend of mine who resides in Toronto) kept telling me to keep making up some outlandish business that I had . . . “I run a spa for rabbits.”

I just kept saying . . . “I’m the guy from the news a month ago who paid off my debts by moving into my trailer.” That was always an interesting concept for people to try to understand.

For me, the evening did what it was supposed to do, get me out and mingling with people. I do need to break the hibernation habit.

Sure, it was not productive, but it was an interesting evening and I will look for more excuses to get out of the trailer. 

Even though parking was an issue, as always, I need a fair bit of space to park. Again, this is a manageable issue and hardly an excuse to not go anywhere.

I did meet a number of interesting people, but once again, I suck at taking photos to commemorate an event. 

I will add that I do feel a bit more relaxed now that I have my Personal Overdraft back. Just knowing that it is there and I have a bit of wiggle room in my budgeting is a comfort.

It is one concrete step on the journey to rebuilding my finances and yes, breaking the cycle of: fiscal crisis => debt => clawing my way out of debt.

As always: Keep your head up, your attitude positive and keep moving forward!

Made It To Payday

Today is a wondrous day for me, for today is the day that my Rebuilding Phase really gets underway. 

This payday I will actually begin the phase of rebuilding my finances. The first of which is to give myself back my Personal Overdraft.

Thankfully I have become so accustomed to having it that I have genuinely felt like I was in the bottom of my overdraft for the past month.

This will ease my tension a bit, but there is still much work to do. 

I have a few ambitious goals to achieve before the end of the year, and I am on track to achieving them.

The achievement that I am most proud of is the fact that I haven’t touched either of my credit cards since paying them off last payday. 

This is important, since I was in the habit of living on them for the previous few paydays. 

I am now getting back into the mindset of “don’t touch them” or rather, breaking that “loosey-goosy” spending trend. 

I still need to get my Mid-Term Account fully funded (to my two-year’s living expenses) before I can start to relax. 

That will break the cycle of running to credit and debt when fiscal trouble arises . . . and then getting tangled in their muck for the next few years. 

This day is but one more step on my journey to truly taking control of my finances and one day achieving fiscal independence. 

As always: Keep your head up, your attitude positive and keep moving forward.