mercurial scribe

i swear i should change this to Money Tuesdays, but it just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Turns out that LowerMyBills.com thing helped us. We hooked up with a company called Credit Solutions to eliminate the madness. They are not a debt consolidation company, oh no! Because, to quote their website, “Debt consolidation and credit consolidation are not the only ways to eliminate debt.” Yes, my friend, there are other ways…

(Give me a sec to stop my inane giggling at a bad mob reference joke…)

Back to the subject at hand: our very nice helper man named, we’ll call him “DJ” explained that basically they settle your debt for you and then you pay Credit Solutions in return. At first i simply wanted to know their angle, you know, how they made money. Turns out they charge a nice little sum of 15% of the original debt (they negotiate reduced settlements). Even so, they reduced most of our debt by incredible amounts.

Remember our unmagical number? $13,080? Bring that to $10,600 minus Loan 1 (they don’t work with that particular lender, if that tells you about the disreputable character of the Loan 1 lending company) and lookee what we have:

Total Unsecured Debt: $10,600.00
Estimated Settlement Amount: $4,240.00
Credit Solutions Service Fee: $1,590.00
Total Debt Elimination Cost (aka What We Now Owe): $5,830.00

That’s $4,770.00 less than the original amount! We’re nearly $5,000 less in the whole because of one simple call. (Wow, do i sound like a commercial or what?)

That covers one end of the spectrum: the debt amount. Now for the other: income.

This is a tricky one. The greatest love/hate relationship a waiter/waitress/server has is with tips. You see, a server is only paid minimum wage and primarily lives on the tips s/he makes. In most states, the tipped employee only earns $2.17 an hour from their employer. i’m blessed - i live in California, so i still get the state’s minimum wage of $7.50 an hour. However, even though i typically work 5 days a week, i’ll only take home maybe $125 in a biweekly paycheck. Why? Because all my taxes from my tips and wages are taken out of my paycheck. i’ve heard servers in other states laugh when they get their checks, all $3.83 of it.

So remember to tip your waiter!

So, if in a given month i’m only taking home $250 in paychecks, how do you think i pay my bills? With CASH, baby! Those tips are my bread and butter.

And my bread and butter has been gettin’ awful stingy lately.

The service industry has a particular flow to it and i’ve worked in it long enough (5+ years now) to know that. But for some reason, my normal $100 days have been more like $30 or $40 days and it’s just not cuttin’ it.

i should have about $500 from the last week and a half of shifts. Instead i have more like $230.

To quote an old favorite, wow. How much is wow? Right between “ouch” and “boing”.

Oh wow, indeed.

Pray for rain, people. Green paper rain.