Wot, Skint??

 

A bit financially fucked going into August.

I was able to put the down payment on the trip away, $1500, yesterday. However, with buying the plane ticket on the CC in July and having to buy a new chair and dispose of my old broken one, I now have something of a heavy month to pay back the CC and not run any interest. I may not be able to put dollar one away for SeptemberVegas in August, leaving me with 3 checks to come up with the last $3K I need to make the cash save number.

I've been in this position before, SO many times. Back in the "still digging out of financial hell and not making that much money" phase of my life, say around 2011-2015, I regularly had to budget the fuck out of my life to make the Vegas save. Denying myself weekends out, skrimping on food, sticking to a strict budget. It's been a while, and I'm out of practice, but I may need to adopt a modified skrimp the next two months.

There are ways I could cheat. I could float some of the CC debt and carry some interest for a month or so (do not want). I could take some cash out of one of my CC accounts (at billions of dollars of interest, do not want). Or I could take another loan or withdrawal out of my 401K, also a bad option as I am already likely to retire with about $37 and a "good luck" cupcake.

But the one thing I've realized over the past 20 years or so is I'm resourceful in situations like this. It's not like a life crisis or anything, it's a Vegas save for fuck's sake, but I usually am able to put my noggin to these things and come up with an answer that gets me where I need to be.

Worst case scenario, if I go with only, say, $3K in gamble funds, it's not the end of the world. I will have a shit ton of RC on the trip to cover food, and probably about $350 of Freeplay by the time I get there, so I can factor that in to the spend for once, too. I usually consider FP to be icing on the cake, but there's no reason not to consider it part of the gamble save, as in a way I've earned it just like I've earned my paycheck. On a 4 full day trip, around $3500 total cash/FP save would be enough.

We'll see what we can figure out. May be fun to have a save challenge for once, like the old days.