APRIL’S 10 THINGS

If you’re new to Deeply in Debt, each month I do a “10 Things” update where I share 10 things that have been on my mind, some personal finance related, and some not. You can see past updates here: March’s 10 Things and February’s 10 Things. Also be sure to check out our student loan debt story and why we created this blog.

(1) We didn’t pay ourselves for 1/2 of March, all of April, and likely all of May. And possibly June and maybe even beyond. This is because we want to be certain we have enough money in our business account to pay employees/all the bills. It’s also because for dentists, it can take a few months to get reimbursed from insurance companies. So Danny will have done work in March/April that he hypothetically won’t get paid for until June/July. Living without a pay check is one of my least favorite ways to live but I’m SO GLAD that we’ve been saving money the last several months instead of making extra student loan payments so that we can pay all of our bills.

(2) We had some money miracles in April. First, our house sold in two weeks and we actually made a small profit on it (which we didn’t expect since we only lived there a little over 2 years). With that, we got a couple of checks I wasn’t expecting– like a $1500 refund from our escrow account and a $500 refund from our canceled home owner’s insurance. We also got a couple of pay checks from work I’d done and just forgotten about. All of which were huge blessings given that we aren’t taking a paycheck from the dental practice at the moment. We have definitely had our fair share of money flops over the last few years, so if you’re reading this feeling bad about your own situation, just remember that life ebbs and flows and eventually you’ll be on the upside :).

(3) We could have easily lost $10,000 on our purchase of the dental practice we just bought. If you follow us on Instagram, you know the story already, but basically we paid the seller’s broker $10,000 as an earnest deposit on the practice we bought. That money was supposed to be applied towards the price of the practice. When the bank disbursed the loan, the earnest money was not applied. Which I only knew because I read every word of the tiny print of each of the documents we signed, and then reread them a couple of times after we got home to make sure I was right, that the $10k had not been applied. We’d previously discussed this with the seller’s broker, that if the money was not applied, they’d simply refund our earnest deposit. (If you don’t know about earnest deposits, basically the idea is that you pay a chunk of money in advance to show a seller that you are serious about the transaction and aren’t just stringing them along. But it’s not supposed to be like extra money that you pay– it’s almost always money that will be applied to the total amount of your purchase price. So this was super sketchy. When I realized the mistake, I contacted the broker, thinking this would be a super easy situation to rectify. The only thing she wrote back was “you’ll be hearing from our attorneys” and I was sick to my stomach. As an attorney, and or as any idiot would know, the phrase “you’ll be hearing from our attorneys” is literally never a good thing. So we went back and forth with these attorneys who were literally awful (hey p.s. please don’t ever hire an attorney to represent you when they don’t live in the state you live in or are doing business in) and tried to make me feel like I was completely stupid for thinking we were owed the $10k. At that point I involved the bank, who has their own attorneys, who helped me duke it out, and I’m happy to report that about a week and a half later, we received our check in the mail! But I was just so sick over it. At best, this was a HUGE (but innocent) error that could have cost me $10,000. At worst, the broker tried to intentionally screw us out of $10,000. Either way, I’m glad that I tracked every single dollar of how our loan was disbursed. So the take away is this– track all of your dollars whether it is in your personal budget or business expenses. It matters!!! I posted the best and easiest way to budget/track spending in this blog post here.

(4) I love Arizona SO MUCH. Maybe I’ll be singing a different tune when things really heat up here in a couple of months but I love the friendly people, wild flowers, cheap cost of food, hikes, swimming, biking, etc.

(5) For the most part, working from home is going well. I don’t get in nearly as many hours as I thought I would. I know when my son starts preschool it will be easier to get things done but I do love having him here while I’m working. A lot of times I’ll give him his “work” to do, like tracing letters, practicing writing his name, doing art, reading, etc and he does pretty well doing it while I work which is fun for me. His a good work buddy. But he can also be super distracting. Just like any coworker I guess. (Like in this photo, he’d colored himself like tiger while I was working #whoops. That’s always how I know it’s time to stop working and give him focused one on one time).

(6) I’ve been writing reviews for money on Capterra for a few months now and I love it. It is by far the easiest $100 I make per month. I’ve done reviews for lots of different websites and apps but none of them even hold a candle to Capterra. You get paid $10 per review to rate popular products (Microsoft Word for example) and it has literally never taken me more than 5 minutes to write a review. All you do is sign in using your LinkedIn account (you can still publish your review anonymously) and once you’re review is published, they send you a gift card for $10. I always choose my gift card to be in the form of an Amazon gift card, but they have other options. You can start writing reviews by clicking here for my link to Capterra and earn your first $5 just for using my link (not to mention the $10 you’ll get for the review) 🙂 It’s not the most user friendly website, but all you do is click my link, enter “Microsoft Word” in the search bar, click it, and it will prompt you to sign in with LinkedIn. After you do so, it will take you to the review page where you’ll write your review and they’ll send a confirmation e-mail when you’re done, and then in a few days or so when it’s published. Easy peasy.

(7) I can’t stop eating Cadbury eggs. I was super sick the days leading up to Easter and felt like I didn’t get to fully enjoy food on Easter so I’ve been making up for it today by eating all the candy. And it’s weird that I enjoy them because they just remind me of law school finals since I’d eat them by the bag to keep me awake studying.

(8) I’ve been having a ton of fun trying to figure out what to do with the 70 lbs of produce I got for $12 this weekend. Actually I only took about half of that because there are only 3 of us in our household but if you haven’t checked out any produce rescue organizations in your area, definitely google it! And if you’re in the Phoenix area, check out produce on wheels without waste! Definitely the cheapest way to score amazing produce. Lots of the stuff I got this weekend was even organic. So far, I’ve frozen a few pounds of green beans and made some epic salsa. If any of you have ideas for what to do with a ton of squash or cucumbers to help them last, drop a comment and let me know!

(9) I just found out that you can watch Survivor for free on CBS’s app and we’ve been binge watching the current season late at night this week. It + the Amazing Race are the only shows that like get my heart pumping and make me feel like I’m there. Do you watch Survivor?? I just can’t help myself. I love it so much.

(10) We celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary in two weeks! My brain cannot comprehend that we’ve been married that long. For the past couple of years I’ve been planning a big get away trip somewhere but given that we just bought a dental practice, rendering ourselves further deeply in debt, we’ll probably just do something simple.

For the comments: how was your April? I’d love to hear from you!

Here at Deeply in Debt, we offer tons of personal finance advice based on our own journey paying off $650k of student loan debt. If you have student loan debt and aren’t sure where to start or what to do, I highly recommend the CFA’s over at Student Loan Planner to help you put together a solid financial plan for your student loan debt. We personally used them and it literally saved us over $200,000 on our student loans. You can check out the Student Loan Planner here.

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