ROE INTENSE

I don’t plan on delivering forever. Thus, I have a Pizza Delivery bucket list. I didn’t come up with it before I started delivering. The crazy stories I have heard and the crazier people I have met and worked with have spawned it. Here it is, in no particular order: Receive a $100 tip. Receive a non-money money tip, such as a gift card or a coupon for something. Deliver to the same customer as another pizza company. Have an order so big, it takes two trips. Have a customer call in a compliment on my service. Last night, I got to cross one off the list. I don’t work Tuesday nights on a regular basis. I talked to Cap’n about switching this week’s Wednesday shift for Tuesday. Amazewife had a Church engagement. She worked it out for me. I joined the team and delivered till 9 PM. My last delivery was to a familiar apartment complex. It towers above the Old Market just off of Jones St. I was the only delivery vehicle there. I parked my car creatively, threw on my hazards and called...

Winning with money is hard work. No really. Wise money management goes against the grain. You’ve got to create limits. You have to exercise patience. You have to get creative on cutting costs when it is easier to just buy now, pay later. Wise money management means that you make a plan. A budget. It’s not a theory. It’s not just a good idea. It’s a plan. To win, you execute on the plan. You give every dollar a name and kick problems in the teeth, one by one. Here are five ways Amazewife and I squeeze more out of every pay period.   1) Sinking Funds Back in our stupid days of money management, we would stumble upon an expense we didn’t expect. These things really were unexpected. Like Christmas. That holiday would sneak up on us every year. And every year we would scramble for hundreds of dollars to meet those expectations. We racked up thousands of dollars over several years in credit card debt. We ended up paying for Christmas months or years after it happened. Sinking funds hav...

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 $...

I clocked myself in to the dispatch computer. The restaurant was hopping. Customer service gals milled about. The Warrior churned out pizzas. Micho was being all manager-ish. I turned from the computer toward my lockbox. I had a significant amount of money and receipts to drop in from my pocketI slid the receipts in first. The simple thermal paper folds like a razor. No problem. Next, a couple bills. They went in fine. The final wad of cash crumpled as I tried to insert it. It was mushy. Damp. Like a half-dried paper towel after you’ve wiped off the counter. “Why is this so wet?” I asked myself. I remembered immediately. It was gross. Cue the memory swirl! It was earlier that evening. I got out of my dented car with a warm bag of pizzas. I was on time. The house was unmarked. It had a chain-link fence, long grass and a broken screen door through which I could see the entryway. A woman appeared at the screen door just as I lifted the latch to their gate. Her eyes went wide as she ...

I know for a fact I’ve mentioned this before: I want to give like no one else. That’s why I want to get out of debt. That’s why I want to sacrifice those things everyone thinks I “need” in order to “live” right now. I do it so that, later on,  I want to give most of my lifestyle away, and still whisk Amazewife off to a beach somewhere every couple of months. This dream was rekindled tonight, but I have to preface the story. My family and I went to see Inside Out for my birthday on the 4th. It was a lot of fun. Most of the movie takes place in the thought processes of an 11 year old girl. Her emotions are the main characters. In fact, everyone’s emotions are characters of some kind. During one part of the movie, Sadness and Joy have gotten lost. They try to find their way back. They find a long lost imaginary friend of the girl’s during their efforts. This friend leads them through a helpful “short cut” to a magical part of the girl’s mind called Imagination Land. This land is fu...