Counting reimbursements before they are hatched
Today I turned in some reimbursement forms for work-related travel and did some financial tallying, the results of which I am about to present here. Now, I have been working on debt reduction/elimination for the past few years, but really only in a particularly directed "let's just get rid of it all!" kind of way for the last year, once I realized just how seriously oppressed I felt by the fact that I had more debt than assets. An unpleasant letter from the IRS this past fall informing me of an expensive booboo on my 2004 taxes set me back quite a few months, but with an aggressive payment schedule it became clear that I was looking at getting rid of it all by this June.
Now the problem with credit cards is that while I am paying them off I am also putting new charges on them, the vast majority reimburseable ones for work, but even so, this complicates issues in that rather than seeing a nice clean balance of "$0" after sending in a largish payment instead I see numbers like $1789. Yes, $1698 of which is ostensibly coming back to me from the university in the near future, but even so, it's not tidy and it doesn't really show clear progress in terms of paying off personal debt.
Anyway, once I turned in today's forms I whipped out the old calculator, or rather, the calculator from the Accessories folder in Windows, and determined that the amount that I am owed by my university is at this point $414 (rounded to the nearest dollar) more than I owe to my credit cards. In other words, technically I am at this moment not only debt-free, I am also in principle $414 in the black (this is, of course, in addition to the rather paltry balance in my savings account). Now because I don't have the lovely $0 balance on the remaining two active cards this realization hasn't really sunk in entirely, and I'm kind of afraid to celebrate too much because reimbursements certainly do take their own sweet time wending their way into my paychecks while the credit card payments have to get sent out quite regularly. But even so, I feel like an enormous oppressive weight is in the process of (kind of slowly) being lifted off my chest. (No chest jokes here, please.) If I truly am debt-free, and really, technically, I am, it is for the first time since like 1997. Possibly even 1996! Before graduate school, I never, ever rolled over debt on my credit cards -- each month I would pay the balance in toto. That's how I liked it to be. Colliculus likes to ask people, "what did you give up for your dissertation?" and in my case it was clearly my physical, emotional, and financial health. But with dedicated work on all of these areas I'm getting better all the time (ptu ptu ptu, she symbolically spat against the evil eye), and this in particular feels like real progress for me. I think I'm really excited! In a hestitant, "now they'd better give me my money soon", kind of way. Now I have to figure out how to celebate this "technically debt-free but not really feeling or believing it yet" milestone. Suggestions welcome!
Now the problem with credit cards is that while I am paying them off I am also putting new charges on them, the vast majority reimburseable ones for work, but even so, this complicates issues in that rather than seeing a nice clean balance of "$0" after sending in a largish payment instead I see numbers like $1789. Yes, $1698 of which is ostensibly coming back to me from the university in the near future, but even so, it's not tidy and it doesn't really show clear progress in terms of paying off personal debt.
Anyway, once I turned in today's forms I whipped out the old calculator, or rather, the calculator from the Accessories folder in Windows, and determined that the amount that I am owed by my university is at this point $414 (rounded to the nearest dollar) more than I owe to my credit cards. In other words, technically I am at this moment not only debt-free, I am also in principle $414 in the black (this is, of course, in addition to the rather paltry balance in my savings account). Now because I don't have the lovely $0 balance on the remaining two active cards this realization hasn't really sunk in entirely, and I'm kind of afraid to celebrate too much because reimbursements certainly do take their own sweet time wending their way into my paychecks while the credit card payments have to get sent out quite regularly. But even so, I feel like an enormous oppressive weight is in the process of (kind of slowly) being lifted off my chest. (No chest jokes here, please.) If I truly am debt-free, and really, technically, I am, it is for the first time since like 1997. Possibly even 1996! Before graduate school, I never, ever rolled over debt on my credit cards -- each month I would pay the balance in toto. That's how I liked it to be. Colliculus likes to ask people, "what did you give up for your dissertation?" and in my case it was clearly my physical, emotional, and financial health. But with dedicated work on all of these areas I'm getting better all the time (ptu ptu ptu, she symbolically spat against the evil eye), and this in particular feels like real progress for me. I think I'm really excited! In a hestitant, "now they'd better give me my money soon", kind of way. Now I have to figure out how to celebate this "technically debt-free but not really feeling or believing it yet" milestone. Suggestions welcome!
posted by Pangea at 8:40 PM
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