I had around 5-6 people come and look at my car this weekend. The result was a little upsetting. I had three offers on the day, two at $7k and one at $6.5k. I almost laughed at the guy that offered me the $6.5k, because that’s a whopping $3,500 below blue book. The other offers that I had were at $7k, which, while it’s not much better than the $6.5k, it’s closer. I think if they had offered me $7.5k, I would have gone through with it.
This morning, on my flight out to work, I ran into one of the directors. He let me know that I was selected to work on a project in Charlotte after I get off of my current project. Turns out that Charlotte is only 240 miles from Atlanta, so looks like I’m going to be driving up there. As it stands, I should be driving the 540i….don’t know how I feel about that. Gas isn’t that bad on the highway, so it shouldn’t be hurting me all that much, and I figure that for a month, this is how it will work out:
480 miles/wk = 1920 miles.
1920 miles / 22mpg = 87.27 gallons of fuel
87.27 gallons * $4.50 (pesimistic) = $392.71 in fuel
1920 miles * $0.585 (IRS Rate) = $1123.20 Pay from Company
Net “Income” = $730ish
So if I were to go about driving for the six weeks of the project, I should pull in around $1100ish that i could dump into my car. “Repairs” and depreciation won’t hurt the car, as it’s already got 108k miles on it.
I’ve been really digging into the forums this past week and have made myself a solid budget. I looked at June’s spending and it was a little….okay….a lot sad. I spent clost to $1,000….on nothing. We’re not talking food and stuff like that. I’m talking about tangible objects that i could have easily gone without. Oh well. This month will be better.

There comes a time in your life when you step back, you look at what you have done with your time and you come to some realizations. This past week, I did just that and found out some pretty disturbing things. I think that I should start off by saying that I have been brainwashed. It’s true.
A few weeks ago, I was driving home from work, flipping through the AM dial (I know…I am a dork…I admit it….I was actually looking for NPR) and stopped at 640AM in Atlanta. On the radio, there was this guy, screaming at someone about how they were paying a “stupid tax”. I was entertained and the advice he was spewing made sense. So for the next week or so, on my ride home from work I tuned in to listen to his spiel. Granted, he throws in bible verses, but referes to the “new age version”….which is slang for translating verses into modern speak …an example “He that co-signs a loan is an idiot”. Luckily, even with my lack of tolerance for religion, I can handle the occasional reference to the Proverbs.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been listening to more of his stuff, reading what I can and generally learning about his process for creating “financial peace”. The jist of the whole program is to eliminate debt, build a 6 month safety fund, fund large expenses (college fund), and pay down house. At first, it was shocking to hear that I “shouldn’t” be borrowing money to buy a car, and I shouldn’t have a single credit card, even to “build credit”.
So after listening to all this stuff, thinking about how I have been spending my money, I decided to take a look at my student loans and see how I was doing with them, so that’s what I did. It turns out that I’ve been paying on student loans for the past 3 years and have paid out $9k. That’s a good bit of money…then I did the calculation out to figure out how much I had actually paid off…$2k. yep, I paid Sallie Mae 7k for the right to have borrowed their money. My heart sank a bit when I saw that. Seeing as how I hate to waste money, I’ve come to some conclusions about how I am going to run my life and my personal finances, and I’ve put together a plan.
This weekend, my Bimmer is being sold. Luckily for me, I had gotten in a slight, and I mean slight, fender bender with a woman that decided to cross five lanes of traffic. The damage to my car was estimated to be $1700, and to a BMW, that means it was literally a small dent and a scratch. Insurance paid me out the money, and now I’ve got the car up for sale. Hopefully, after this weekend, I’ll be able to pay off my grandmother the balance that I owe her. I’ll use the rest of the money that I have left over and buy a nice little Honda Civic beater-mobile and rock that for the next 2-3 years. I figure that if I budget correctly, I can pay down the $45k in student loans that I currently have in the next 3 years. To do that, I’m going to have to pay out around $1300 a month to student loans. It’ll be miserable, but without a car payment and with the new pay increase that I got a few months back, this is something that can be done.
At this point, I would typically write “we’ll see”, but not this time. This is the plan, and I fully intend to stick to it. Wish me luck.