Debt-o-meter

Tonight, I re-totaled the amount of debt I'm in.

"Bad Debt" totals 65% of my annual salary.  This is down from nearly 75% about a year ago (errr... using my current salary as a yardstick--otherwise it would be 115%), so we are working hard at getting out of this.  I'd like to say it's because we "never use credit cards anymore", but that's not true.  Just this month, we "had to" dip another $1100 in debt (mostly business expenses for my wife, but also a myriad of birthdays for which we got small gifts)... but it's short term (I have a paycheck coming in for that amount... whenever the government gets around to it).  We're just so far down because I'm being very aggressive about paying down the low balances when we have extra cash.  ...And I'm doing a lot of extra work to make that possible.  We are also currently living "within our means"... though that's hypocritical to say, with that much debt.

We also owe 20% of my salary for our car.  According to Blue Book, it's currently worth 65% of what we owe on it.  Sigh.

As for our house, we're also "deep in the hole".  I think it's worth 75% of what we owe on it.  And what we owe is 2.4 years of my salary.

So, in summary: eesh.  Things are improving, but... man, we were so far in the shitter to begin with, I'm still seriously worried.



(Sorry for the fuzzy-math.  I prefer using actual dollar values, but my wife has explicitly asked that I don't.)