deanj

I may not always be the “hot bald guy” but at least I’m secure in the knowledge that I’m not the “guy with a bad comb over” or the “guy with a bad toupee.”

I’d grown my hair long in back while it was thinning more and more in front; picture Riff Raff versus the Mullet. In any case, that was bad enough to finally drive me to the old school barber shop, with a stack of playboys and lottery tickets covering the walls, and pay them ten-bucks to buzz it all off. I figure the cranky bastard at a man’s barber shop knows what to do with my hair better than some punk at the mall. It made a nice ritual to go there every few weeks and get clipped but now I have my own clippers and buzz it off once a week.

I really wished that I’d done it years ago. It looks better. It’s so much less trouble. Do buy some nice sunscreen and a few nice caps though.

We owed $30k on credit cards. It was hard work but we did pay it all off and for the last several years we’ve never carried a debt on our sole remaining credit card.

How we did it was:

1. List all of the cards with the interest rate and the amount owed (when we did this, we owed much more than we had realized).

2. We did everything we could to reduce the interest rates by taking advantage of some low interest introductory offers but more effective was simply calling and asking for a lower rate (CitiBank was the oly one to refuse, even though they were our highest rate card, they remain on my shit list. They were my first credit card as a 20-year old so I had some nostalgia for them but I’ll never carry their card again.).

3. We dramatically cut back our expenses and lived as cheaply as we could while we put every spare dollar toward the highest rate card. Minimum payments only to the lower rate cards. One by one we paid them off.

4. We had some stocks that weren’t going anywhere and we had some savings. All of it was put toward the cards since it didn’t make sense to be paying interest in order to maintain some lame stocks and some spare cash in the savings account.

Pay them off. Learn to live within your means. It’s something that I don’t talk about much but I’m very proud of this accomplishment.

College is great. It helped me recognize and hone valuable skills (I’m a software engineer) (I have Bachelor and Master degrees in Computer Science). If I were to do it over again I’d do it faster and with much more focus (A Masters degree is kind of a 2nd chance and I did this).