Brief intro: My wife and I are in our early 40's and our finances are a mess. Everything was mostly in order until around 2012, when a series of severe health issues (two bouts with cancer and an unrelated severe car accident) kicked us off a steady financial path and on a downhill tumble. While she was sick we had significantly reduced income, and put a lot of medical expenses and living expenses on credit, and ate most of our long-term savings. We're "trying" to get things back in order but honestly we're just floundering around, not making any real progress.
The good:
- We each have a steady corporate job (maybe $110k gross combined), but benefits are very soft
- A pretty good amount of home equity (value ~260k, owe ~120k)
- Some long-term investments (about $120k in individual stocks, but not nearly what we should have to ever be able to retire)
- Her car owned outright
- Cook at home most of the time, try to pack lunch to work most of the time, eat out only a few times a month
The bad:
- Like 30k in credit card debt, including $21k on an Amex that's in her mom's and her name
- Two small debts under $2k that are in collections, and a third that hopefully is gone now (they sent us a summons, we hired a lawyer, collections couldn't provide proof of debt, our lawyer said it'd be deleted)
- Accounts and auto-payments with all sorts of services all over the place - Our credit union, Regions, Paypal, I don't even know them all off the top of my head. Tracking our money is like untangling wire clothes hangers.
- Just about nothing in any 401k or other dedicated retirement, aside from the aforementioned stocks
- My car has a monthly payment
- She has a ton of unreimbursed personal expenses for business, so her actual net income is way lower than gross - Federal income taxes are unexpectedly rough for 2018 because said unreimbursed expenses are no longer deductible - Credit scores are in the low-mid 500's - no passive income
The ugly:
- Together we have a terrible relationship with money, even typing this post is making me nauseous
- Undisciplined spending habits. Penny-wise, pound-foolish, sometimes penny-foolish too. - An unspecified/unknown amount of medical debt from an auto accident and her spine surgery (disc replacement, tons of PT/rehab, etc). In short, all the paperwork/expenses went through our personal injury lawyer, but the insurance had a meaner lawyer than us, we lost in court and we haven't spoken to our lawyer in a couple years.
.
Where do we even start? Ideas:
-- Try to make a budget.
1. try to get excel-compatible statements from banks and Paypal, to categorize income/payments. Will Mint do this?
2. use that to have a rough idea of our spending over the past several months
2a. cry and drink some vodka
3. figure out where we can cut and trim expenses
3a. probably argue and nitpick over insignificant stuff
4. Load that into YNAB and see what happens
-- Stop avoiding the things that went to collections, look them up from creditkarma statements, contact them to demand proof of debt.
-- do something about this credit card debt. We've been paying double the minimums, on time every month, for the past two years. Good payment history, but we're barely denting the principal. I think we have enough equity to do a home equity loan, but our credit scores are crap so that might not be viable. We asked our CU about a home equity loan about a year ago and they basically laughed us out of the office.
Anyway. Any ideas or expert opinions will be considered.
Submitted March 19, 2019 at 04:42PM by VictorVoyeur https://ift.tt/2Of2FEX
