Another Friday

Some times I feel like I'm on a treadmill. Not the kind at the gym, that would actually do me some good, but the kind where you just schlep along, with the illusion of moving forward, but in fact, just killing time until it's time to get off.

Friday represents this for me. It's like, yea, Friday, but then I realize that I've spent another week, doing not much of anything. What did I accomplish, except to remain employed, to do the laundry and to fight back the big chunks of dirt in the house.

We're hacking down a considerable debt. I wish I knew exactly where we racked it up. It's probably from the last seven years, which included the sale and purchase of 3 houses, four moves, multiple luxurious vacations, a two-year sabbatical, three new computers, three new vehicles, and thousands of restaurant meals. I guess it's not so mysterious where the debt came from after all.

I like to think that I'm financially savvy, but I work in sales and you kind of get weird about money. At the end of the year you get your W-2 and there's a six-figure number on it, but the government takes its share, you fund your retirement, you buy a shit-load of insurance and voila, you end up taking home about 60% of what you've earned. Meanwhile, you've been spending like a Texas millionaire.

So this is the year of austerity. We got on board with this about six months ago. We saved a bit in an emergency fund and started paying down the debt, and whammo, we got hammered with household repairs. Some stuff on the house you can put off, you can't put off the replacement of a sewer-pipe. People asked me:

1. Doesn't the city pay for that?
2. Doesn't your insurance pay for that?

The answer: No. If the sewer-pipe is on your property, its yours to maintain. If the sewer-pipe failed because of lack of maintenance, then your insurance won't cover it. The good news (if you can call it that) is that if the sewer-pipe backs up, floods the basement, causes mold to grow and contaminates the carpeting, THEN the insurance will pay. You'll pardon me for being happy that we didn't have that level of sewer-pipe drama.

So what does it cost to dig up your freshly landscaped yard, haul out a collapsed iron sewer-pipe and to replace it with a new PVC pipe? About $7000 and a big patch of your lawn. I don't think I can't explain the trauma of an enormous backhoe digging up a newly planted centipede/zorsia lawn. In a drought. I just can't.

And so there is debt. I flash-back to our rather cool basement apartment some days, knowing that we should have stayed put there. We had plenty of space for the two of us. Yes, the little dog in the apartment above us drove us to distraction with his barking and clickity-clack of his nails on the hardwood floors, but when the neighbors waterpipe broke and flooded our utility room, it wasn't our problem.

We had no business buying our house. Atlanta hasn't been a hot housing market since the 1996 Olympics, in fact, it's the number-one area of the country for foreclosures and mortgage fraud. But I fell in love with the house, or rather its potential. Let's just call it a money pit, and leave it at that.

There's good news. We have an FHA, conventional loan with a low payment. Our neighborhood is slowly going up in value, we owe less on the house than it's worth. With the deductions we get from the house, the mortgage is only a couple hundred dollars more than the apartment and we have twice the room.

But getting to my point I measure my days, not in coffee spoons, but in amount of debt we pay off. I HATE wishing my days away to get to the next paycheck. But really, in economic times like this, isn't that what we all do? I am very grateful that I have it all covered and enough left over to properly pay down the debt.

I guess there's no point in regret. I need to embrace the decisions that I've made, be happy about the good ones, learn from the bad ones.

On Yom Kippur we atone, but also, we need to forgive, those who do us wrong, but also ourselves. What's done is done and we're making the best of it.