It's Not A Bender, It's A Lifestyle.

The money pressure is...off. Decided to stop paying 24% interest every month on my hard-to-kill CC debt and took out a loan against my 401k at 8.5%. Will pay off the card this month and still have a little extra to put toward the Vegas cash fund.  I will pay back the loan via payroll deductions (painless) over 4 years and all the interest goes back into my 401k account, so essentially I'm paying myself the interest instead of some bank in Omaha. With this I can get back to living within the means on the CC, paying it off every month and in the long run saving money lost to ridiculous CC interest. So the $2K I'm banking here for cash, along with the work bonus coming in early December knocks the Vegas cash save dead. Won't have to scrimp too much or get creative over the next month to make the save number, as I was going to have to otherwise. Also won't have to murder the CC in town as I'll have a full $1K per day (or maybe a little more) while there. Is this ideal, ...

  Discounts and freebies, the 2024 Xmas edish. -5 nights at Freddies Aria: Stay Well Strip View King, $442, 3 nights comped, would be $2328 rack rate, savings of $1886 (youch). -$50 Freeplay, $50 Resort Credit on booking package, $100 value. -$230 in Rewards Points (resort credit), ~$200 in Slot Dollars from MGM Rewards, value $430. Short list but a sweet one, and all from being a loyal MGM slave  member. $2416 saved or earned. A good haul, maybe top 5 all time? Dunno, but it makes it a doable trip whereas in this crappy financial year it may not have been possible. The room rate the star of the show, as usual. Sure, I could have stayed at a similar rate at quite a few resorts on strip this time, but not in this nice a room at this nice of a resort. With nearly $300 in RC avail, if I play my cards right that can be 3 great meals, and with the $250 in FP I will probably sit down at a triple play VP machine on dollars and try to turn it into $4K minimum. 40 days, 40 days.

Life is minimizing my Vegas. It's only going to be three trips this year. I'm accustomed, since 2014, to doing four or more. The financial realities of my life now make that difficult. Last Xmas I did OK on money, paid it forward into the Birthday trip. Birthday trip I did OK on money, paid it forward into the June trip. Then the June trip happened. I still am not, and won't be this year, fully recovered from that ass-whupping. So no late summer, early fall trip this year. 6 months of drought. I'm not OK with that. I've come to really need the time off and release that comes with a regular, every few month Vegas trip cycle. As I'm now less than 2 months from a trip I'm starting to emerge from the funk, but the funk was real. August/September were some dark days , stuck in a shitty job with no prospect for any real time off until December. I can now see the light at the end of the tunnel, but may find myself in a similar tunnel next year. The realities now wi...