My Journey to Retirement after Divorce, part one

I really didn’t think about my finances too much until my separation. I was following the, old school, legacy scenario. Go to school… get a job… work till you die. My wife and I were always pretty frugal. I purchased my first new car making 7.50/hour, and we got married in 1998 without a pot to piss in. We got by on a wicked-tight shoe string. But the wedding was killer. It was, and will be one of the happiest days of my life.

Early on, and into marriage I had debt, and didn’t think too much about paying minimums. We did, however, often pay off any credit card debt.  I remember the very first thing I ever financed, ever in my life… my Crate GT 200 Combo Guitar Amp….ohhhh…. \m/ \m/

This all changed when we split. All of a sudden I realized I was going to be responsible for living on my own. I’ll have to pay bills all on my own. My mortgage, my car payment, utilities, I had no idea what child support was going to be. I was so totally terrified.

This was a shock to the system.

I immediately started to take action and some of the things I did were:

Reviewed my expenses

I hadn’t really paid a lot of the bills. My wife had really done a majority of the family finances from a joint checking, joint savings, and joint credit card. This took a bit of a learning. I reviewed utilities, and other bills to see how much I needed to live on, and what I could eliminate. For starters, the first thing to go was DishNetwork. I had been unconsciously paying over $100 a month for TV/DVR in which I really didn’t have time to watch anyway. I eliminated my DishNetwork bill, and quickly realized there was other things that could go.

Reviewed my Mortgage, and Refinanced

We had moved into our primary residence, a single family home, in 2002. One thing we had been doing is something called the equity accelerator program, offered by the lender. Some mortgage companies offer a similar program. This allowed us to pay our mortgage every two weeks vs. once a month. Be careful, there can be fees attached to this. However, for ten years we had been jamming on this. We were making great progress on paying off the mortgage. Sadly, I had started over. I had to refinance the home load to lower the monthly payment, and thus 30 years kicked off again from the beginning, More on this in future posts.

Created a Budget

I usually just used a “I probably have this much in my account” method of budgeting. Meaning, I really didn’t have one. I did usually clear any larger purchases with my wife, and talked it over with her on why I needed the newest iPhone, MacBook, Iron Maiden Box Set or Robotic Lawn Mower. But now, I was on my own. Time to get real. Since I had reviewed my expenses, and needed to budget I graduated from Apple Numbers spreadsheets and opened an account with Mint to track things. I was horrible at spreadsheets anyway.

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