freefallgirl

I’ve read “Your Money or Your Life” twice & listened to the CDs too. Now, I’m ready to pay off debt. I have a car loan & student loans & a bit of credit card debt, but not much.

Step one is finding a post-graduation job. I’d like to be a teacher, but right now, I just need to work & have some moola. I’m interviewing & need to keep it up.

Step two is cutting spending. My weaknesses are clothes & eating out.

Step three is realizing what I already have & being grateful for it. This will make me feel happy instead of deprived about the cutting spending thing.

Step four is single-mindedly putting the majority of what I earn toward debt.

Once my debt is gone, I need to focus on savings & investments.

Life is meant to be lived, not spent slaving away to pay off money I’ve borrowed from evil credit card companies.

I went to an interview yesterday to work at a doc’s office. He asked me what jobs I’d enjoyed in the past & he told me that I wouldn’t be a good fit at his office. He said I would feel stifled & that I should go become an art teacher because it seemed to be the only thing about which I was “fired up”.

It’s true that I do want to be in the teaching field, but I have to pay bills at the same time. I don’t have a teaching degree & my interviews with 3 school systems did not work out for me. I’m not trying to make excuses, I just know that I probably won’t be able to be a teacher unless I go back to school for a master’s degree. That’s something that I can’t afford to do unless I have a job to pay my way through it. I feel like I’m in a vicious & unproductive cycle of not being able to do what I want.

I ran pretty regularly for about 30 minutes per day at least 3-5 days a week from ages 17 – 22ish. However, I began having panic attacks after 9/11 & I stopped feeling confident enough to go for a run alone, especially if I had to deal with cat calls.

I’m ready to face my fears & get out running again. I think the exercise will boost my ability to fight the panic naturally. I’m now married & have put on about 20 pounds, but not so much that I can’t get out for a run.

It may take a while to get back into the swing of it, but I want to see myself as “athletic” again. Also, I want to feel confident & healthy, even if I never weigh 130 pounds again (my weight as a 17 year old runner).