It's already the end of July and time to revisit the Goals I set out for myself in the begining of the month. It's not too pretty, I admit. Here's all the gory details:Goal:
1. Actively seek professional development and additional income.
Result:
Success! No additional income yet but definite progress made towards securing secondary employment.
Goal:
2. Pay back Boyfriend and Friend C.
Result:
Failure. Paid back Boyfriend the $300 I thought I owed him. Due to an error the amount was actually $390. Then I used his portion of a work reimbursement check to pay my phone bill. Then I borrowed another $120 in order to pay Evil Collection Agency. I did not pay back Friend C as she lives in a different city and in all likelihood has forgotten the $60 (even though I haven't).
Goal:
3. Avoid Evil Overdraft Monster
Result:
Failure. Sigh. This was really a stupid mistake on my part. I was able to get the bank to refund half the overdraft fee ($19) but it still bugs me that I overdrafted in the first place. Need to keep focusing on that goal.
Goal:
4. Only use in-network ATMS
Result:
Failure. Ok, I have to plan better for this but it only happened two times and I'm sure there was a really good excuse at the time. I like using cash and I never like to have too much on me but since I don't drive it's a pain in the butt to always make sure I'm close to one of my bank's ATMs - though they are ubiquitous.
Goal:
5. Purchase Sister's Wedding Gift
Result:
Failure. Well it was always going to be difficult to do this in July but the unexpected difficulty of settling my defaulted student loan made it impossible. Running out of time to get a gift.
All in all, I think I made some good progress in July, just not as much as I would have liked. I just made two dumb mistakes - forgetting about my Sprint bill and accidentally overdrafting my account - that will require better planning if I want to avoid them in the future.
Like the famous quote I should put up on my wall:
"If you fail to plan, you plan to fail."
Tomorrow I will announce my August goals, which will be a little less ambitious now that I have to carry over some of my failures from July.
4 comments:
Sallie, I disagree that your goal #5 is a failure!!
Traditional etiquette says that you have up to a year following the wedding. Of course, it'll be nice to be able to give a gift off the registry and early so that the couple can use it sooner. But, gift giving should be commensurate with what you can give.
Perhaps rather than making such an ambitious (and possibly unrealistic) goal, you should change it to saving $X/month towards the gift so that you can give a nice gift to your sis within 1 year.
:-D
I love this blog! Sallie is also our distant cousin!! but we locked in good rates at 2.8 for life so I don't worry about her as much!
HS
Thanks! I recently saw someone else claim they had locked in a low rate - had a larger loan amount than me and was only paying like $125 a month! I looked into it to no avail - expect a post on this soon but you are very lucky!
I've paid on mine for 3 years and my rate actually has dropped to 2.625% fixed on my federal loans. The sad part was I thought it was going to drop even lower than that since I have made 36 consecutive on time monthly payments. I'm more concerned with getting rid of the credit cards than student loans though.
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