Account help: i live paycheck to paycheck, i have never taken my family on - Help.com

Man look at sites like peopleperhour.com, if you have some skills in writing etc or doing some odd jobs you might be able to pick up a few extra bucks.

Hope things look better soon.

i second that, it would be nice to be able to have a savings(at least you had one at one point i guess, haha). is your wife working as well? perhaps try a from-home type business. if they’re off to school a part-time wouldn’t be out of the question. i personally wouldn’t stop searching for something better either, some places pay better than others. side jobs are also a good idea.

Yep, we all are like that.

Sometimes, I find that their are people who have steady jobs, with incomes that are not high, but are certainly within what could be considered “normal”, yet they can’t seem to make ends meet. The culprit is usually debt.

You may be able to contact your insurance company and fight why they denied your claim for medical expenses. If that doesn’t work, then there’s nothing else for it but to start chipping away at the debt. But there’s a method to that particular madness as well.

First, take all your debts, wherever they are, and lay all the statements out on a table. Then arrange them in order, from the highest interest rate to the lowest. From there, see if there is any room left on the credit limit of the lowest interest rate debt, and if there is, move debt from the higher interest rate sources to the lower ones.

Once all your debt is organized properly with the lowest interest rate ones maxed out and as small of balances as possible on the higher interest rate ones, then you can start organizing your payments.

A lot of folks I counsel in this area try to make more than the minimum payments on all their debts. If they have $1000 that they’re putting toward their debt per month that they’re trying to pay down, they’ll braek it up over 4 or 5 sources of debt and try to lower all the balances at once.

Don’t do that.

Every single one of the debts should receive the absolute minimum payment required, EXCEPT for the one with the highest interest rate. That entire extra $1000 (in this hypotthetical scenario) should be dumped on that single source of debt. Then, when that one is wiped out, you take that entire payment ($1000 plus the minimum on that source), and roll it into the next highest interest rate debt. The effect si that now you have two regular payments plus that extra $1000 that’s being dumped onto the second highest interest rate debt. When that one is wiped out, you end up with three payments plus the $1000 on the third source. And so on.

This is called a debt snowball. The benefits are threefold:

1)The math works - you end up paying less overall interest on your debt as you pay it off.

2)It’s faster than you think - I’ve seen people literally roll their eyes or scoff derisively when I tell them that if they do this, they could be debt free in 12, 15, 18, or 24 months. When they stick to the plan, their skepticism turns to gratitude.

3)It keeps you motivated - NOTHING feels better than burning that credit card or account statement after the debt on it has been completely eliminated from your life. Seriously: it’s a bigger high than buying a new house.

Good luck.

right there with ya. But no family (any more)

I’m serious, friend, the debt snowball is your way out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt-sno…

Read up on it some more, and get your life back on track. You can do it!

BTW, I think the reason why you got so much support from your question is that most people with your problem come on here to beg for money. You didn’t, and that’s really cool. We all appreciate your willingness to take ownership of your own issue.