ROE INTENSE

Last week I received a life-changing product in the mail: Discover’s ‘Debt Eraser’ personal loan. Amazewife caught it while I was at work. She was ecstatic. She didn’t wait to tell me. My Google Chat did a jig on my screen and distracted me from Job #1. Boy am I glad that it did. This little product changed me from the moment I saw it. Here’s how: The brochure within promises “to get rid of my higher-interest debt” in two steps. Yep, that’s it. Two simple steps. 1) “Use the Debt Eraser loan to erase the higher-interest debts you have now,” then, 2) “Erase the Debt Eraser loan itself until that’s gone, too!” Life changing. “But RI,” you are now asking, “You must be silly. How could this change your life? You’re against debt, not for it.” You are correct. This changed my life by further cementing this truth: Credit card and personal loan companies think the American public are stupid. Amazewife and I proved them right for far too long. Discover should be ashamed of itself. T...

I’ve been meaning to write this down for a long time. It kept slipping my mind. Fighting off aliens is intense, but I guess it’s not ROE INTENSE. My Ford Taurus puttered to a tired halt at the intersection of 29th and east-bound Martha. I hit the left-turn signal. A slow plume of steam rose from two pizza bags in my passenger’s seat. A west-bound vehicle passed with Corridos blaring from its lowered windows. My radio was on. Somebody on NPR just talked about baby seals being underfunded when applying for state-owned meth rehabilitation services in Canada. I thought about changing the channel, but decided it was too important to be well-balanced politically. Three cars moved through the intersection as I adjusted my pizza cap. One, a white Toyota Avalon, putted South on 29th with black tinted windows. The other two – near-identical Ford Aerostars – moved north in single file. The leading van had a yellow, thick length of mule tape strapped from its rear to under the hood of the trail...

We hit the ground running two months ago getting our home ready for sale. We put it on the market June 26th and kept it in tip-top shape for a solid month. We’re happy to announce that it has sold. What a headache that was. Yet, through all that headache and my own tendencies to get really whiney, I received some subtle reminders about my blog. People wanted new stuff. And they want to know about money. And how we’re doing. I can handle that, no matter how emo I feel sometimes. People care about results. Cold, hard results. And warm fuzzy results. My wife and I have produced many results as we have ploughed into our debt like a kid in a bubble soccer match.  As of September 21st, I will have been delivering pizzas for a year. October 1 of last year, I posted that our payoff date was calculated to November 2015 or sooner. We had just got the balance of the credit card down to $3,000. Meredith’s student loan had hovered around $11,000 or so. My student loan was $18,000. That’s $...