Reality Check

Yesterday, I wrote about how I could finally start making up a budget because I found out when I will be starting my next job. Well, today I started making one...and then I cried. My pay cheques do not go as far as I somehow originally assumed they would. It was a super depressing activity. 

I thought that my husband and I would pay off all of our debt and save up enough to leave for Australia by next February. That was a little too optimistic. By May I will have hopefully paid off one of my credit cards...that's almost halfway through the year. Altogether we have 3 credit cards, a very large line of credit, and a new car loan. (We also have small student loans but the payments on those are so small that they're kind of off the radar right now). On top of that, to do a working holiday in Australia, we each need 5000$ in our bank account so that they know we can afford to live there for a little bit. It's also very expensive to even get to Australia. It doesn't help that this job is only for, maybe, 7 weeks and then I have no idea when my next one will be after that. Basically, it's going to take us longer to get to Australia than I originally thought.

It made me feel a little bit better when I realized that we could for sure have the line of credit paid off by the end of the year, probably a lot sooner actually, now that I am doing the math. That's assuming we are both working almost non-stop for the rest of the year, which is definitely not guaranteed...or even all that likely. I'm getting depressed again. 

I wish we had things we could sell. All of our furniture is Ikea so it's practically worthless. We have a car but we owe more money on it than it is even worth. We'd have to make a LOT of extra payments on it just to break even when we sell it...BAH!!

Maybe we shouldn't do our working holiday in Australia. There are other cool places. My sister found this program for working holidays in the UK. They will put us together in jobs at a hotel and you're provided with free or very cheap accommodations at the hotel you are working at. It's cheaper to fly to the UK and you don't need to have as much money in your bank account to apply. I don't really care where I go as long as it's somewhere different and somewhere I eventually want to go anyway. If I had to pick only one place to do the working holiday, I would choose Australia...but maybe I don't have to pick one...