This is not okay. In fact, thanks to another blogger (I will find the link and put it here!), I found the words to explain how not okay this is. Owing money on credit cards is an emergency. I've been in this emergency for going on 12 years.
On the flip side, I think I have a pretty good excuse for most of it. I needed to stay alive. Not day to day living expenses so much as that I needed a shot )to stop bleeding to death so I could have the surgery to make the bleeding stop forever) and my copay (when I had insurance) was $2700. I was able to finance that with loans from family and the ever present credit card debt. I had paid down 1/3 of my maximum credit card debt when that came up. I pay off $2000 and then get hit with something that has to be taken care of or I will literally fall apart for $1500 or worse, $3000.
It's been like that for awhile and it's depressing. I'll putter away at my student loan debt for years, I have decent interest rates and they are in no danger of growing, but I desperately want to pay off my credit cards.
I'd been thinking about cashing in my stocks for some time to pay it all off, but there always seemed to be something more pressing. With only 2-3 days home a month, there's so much to do. But when I saw my stocks were enough that I could actually pay off all of my credit card debt, I started kicking myself for not doing it sooner. I started rummaging for how do I actually sell these, and when I was on the road with some time off (14 hour days take their toll, the toll primarily being collapse into bed unconscious when I'm done before getting up and doing it again!) I readied myself to sell them only to find that they had gone from being worth a few hundred dollars more than I owed to credit cards to being a couple thousand less.
The companies that I have shares in are still worth the same amount (or more) that they were a month ago, and this is why this is a good thing. While I really shouldn't be investing in the stock market or much of anywhere other than my 401k up to the matching point while I have credit card debt, I do have an automatic deduction set up to purchase certain funds and stocks and I don't intend to change it. Particularly now that the market has crashed.
For purely psychological purposes, I'm going to leave it again. I'm going to let investors get over their sudden fears, while I keep plugging away and when my stocks have recovered, then I will sell them and pay off my bills. The only reason they are still down at the moment is fear. Fear of what the Fed will do with interest rates, fear than the company they were hoping would make 5 million in profit this past quarter only made 4.75 million and it could be a sign they were wrong about other things, but it all boils down to fear that the stock will keep plummeting and they will lose out.
Well, it might. We could also have an extinction level event with almost no warning and you could die in the next few seconds while sitting here reading this.
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Still here? Good. So am I. So is the market and it will be in a week and in a month.
I love to check my stocks. When the market is rising, it's beautiful for my bottom line. When it's falling, it's a great time to work on your investments before it rises again. We all know the mantra to buy low and sell high, but enough people are making emotional buying and selling decisions that the market fluctuates because of that alone.
I'm almost out of this emergency situation. First, I beat cancer. Now, I'm beating this. 12 years in the making, but victory is at hand!
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