I Feel Financially Depressed

This is a sad, miserable post. Please do not read unless you wish to be depressed too!

I just updated my “debt-o-meters” sidebar and am struck by how slowly I am inching towards paying my debt off. Over the summer, I got paid fewer times and very irregularly, but I managed not to rake up more debt and save some money in my freedom account, but by the end of the summer I was exhausted. My August pay was only for half the month and most of my August snowflakes went towards paying my semester bill (my grad program pays for tuition, but I have to pay for misc fees which come up to approximately $350/semester). A few days ago, I looked at my pitiable bank balance and decided that I needed to dip into my savings account in order to survive the month. So, I transferred $150 from my HSBC account to my checking account. I am perilously near crossing my budget limit thanks to a shopping and casino trip with my sister (it was fun, but I lost at the casino). I know that I spent the money because of an unwise choice that I made, but it has been almost a year since I bought myself any new clothes.

I do make some sensible decisions too, but I feel that this adds to my depression. Take for instance the case of my housing. Early last year was when I started to become even remotely aware of my financial situation. For three years I had lived in a lovely apartment – not extremely expensive, but pricey enough for me to decide that I could not continue to live there anymore. I decided to find the cheapest apartment possible and send the savings towards my debt. I found such an apartment soon – they were the cheapest rooms in town. I would have a large living room, a cupboard-sized space for a bedroom (space enough for a bed and night-stand and nothing else), and a large kitchen. All utilities paid except internet. The downside – the rooms were in the basement of a prehistoric house, I had to share the restroom (no tub, just a shower stall) with another inhabitant of the other side of the basement, no laundry facilities on-site, the basement also turned out to be much damper than I had imagined it would be. Pretty miserable conditions really. I might have found a roommate for a better apartment, but having had some quite negative experiences with roommates before, I decided not to. Anyway, I was saving a large chunk of money, and I was willing to put up with the crappy apartment. I moved in. A month later Murphy struck and my car (which was an old old old piece of junk) died. I decided to invest in a much newer car, took out a loan and guess what? The difference in my rent just about covered my car payment – so a year and a half later, there hasn’t been even a fraction of the movement that I had hoped to see in my debt-reduction. But I am okay with that – I have a lovely car that I can use for another ten years at the very least.

And then something happens to depress me even further - I stayed a couple of days at a friend’s place last week and simple luxuries such as a bathtub, and a bedroom with space for a TV in it, a window that actually lets some light in, ceilings that I cannot touch even if I tried to, and other such things made me want to move right out of my crappy apartment. In a year’s time, I will be off on internship and will be making more money. I could stop trying so hard and allow myself a bit more luxury right now. I make and save so little right now that in the long run all this frugality is only going to knock off 5-6 months off my debt-reduction payment. I show all the signs of depression in the financial area of my life – I feel hopeless, stuck, tired, frustrated and angry (with myself more than anyone else). I wish dearly that I could somehow fast-forward a year of my life!!!