bloodygranuaile

I just checked my bank balance and almost had a heart attack. 

When did my rent get to be half my income? Rent is only supposed to be one-quarter of your income; a third at the most. My rent has gone up every year (or twice a year) since I graduated, and my hourly pay rate has also gone up a bit since my first job out of college, but somehow my weekly income has stayed exactly the fucking same.

Am doing the "praying to all the deities I don't believe in that I magically don't get laid off this time" dance again, where by "dance" I mean "having stress headaches."

Cash Flow: the name for the fact that if you have $1000 starting cash in your checking account, $2000 in savings, $3000 in income, $4000 in your PayPal account, a $5000 tax refund, $10000000000000000 from any other source in the world... and $1001 in expenditures, you WILL be desperately scrounging around under your couch cushions for loose change and hoping you can get to the bank early enough tomorrow morning, because otherwise you WILL overdraw and get hit with overdraft fees. Because while you have to pay your bills promptly (and perhaps automatically), any incoming money can just take its sweet-ass time.

Am extra annoyed because part of my extreme cash flow crunch right now is because I had to pay sales tax and registration fees on my car TWICE. I paid the dealer in NJ because in NJ they take care of that for you. Exactly nine days into the ten-day registration window for MA, I was told that they couldn't do it and I had to go to the DMV to do registration and pay the sales tax myself. Dealer said they would refund my fees. Well, I went to the DMV on Monday, and MassDOT has cashed the check I wrote them, and my check from the NJ dealer hasn't arrived yet.

What's got me worried is that my $10 for Netflix bills automatically tomorrow. If I don't deposit literally like five dollars into checking tomorrow before that bill arrives, then my rent check will bounce should my landlord decide to actually cash it before I get either my paycheck, my refund from Nissan, or my Elance payment. Since it has been almost two weeks since I actually wrote that check, it is conceivable he may cash it soon. Transfers from savings take 2 business days, timesheets at work get submitted tomorrow but I think they send you the actual check through the mail, transfers from Elance to PayPal take two business days, and transfers from PayPal to BOA take four business days, and also tomorrow is Friday. So while I should be able to to do the five dollars because I have that much in cash in my wallet, I can't avoid getting absolutely down to the wire until at least the middle of next week.

I don't want to be complaining, because I've been in worse spots and I know a lot of other people are in worse spots--I'm fully employed at a fairly generous wage, plus the side job; I was merely underemployed and for only about six weeks before that. I have money in savings. I am doing pretty well overall, it's just that what I have immediately ACCESSIBLE is less than what I need to be immediately accessible and I don't want to pay forty dollars in overdraft to those tax-evading vampires at BOA because the Nissan dealership is too unprofessional to take a look at their out-of-state registration policies before billing me for them. BOA paid no taxes on $4.4 billion in profits last year; they can leave me my $40 so I can keep futilely trying to pay off my student loans. (I think the Dept. of Ed. actually does not actually want my money, just to ruin my credit. Otherwise they would not make it so difficult to give them money. Also, I will never forgive them for unconsolidating my previously consolidated loans and thus tripling my monthly payment. Payments, plural, now. One of which cannot be done online, but has a website anyway just to waste your time trying to register.)

Also, I am still looking for housing for the summer. I need it to be less than $600/month and I need to be able to get into the Back Bay neighborhood in Boston via public transit in under an hour. That is all. When I get this squared away I will be much less stressed. If anyone knows of anything that fits that criteria, please let me know; Craigslist is a madhouse right now. Also when I get this sorted out I can stop spending the precious few hours I have in the evening looking for housing and can do some of my Elance assignments, so I don't have to spend all weekend doing it.

Blargh. I'm sorry I'm so stressed and angry and whiny, but I have been stressed all week, and when I started this week I thought "I only need to be stressed through this week!" and I assumed that by the end of the week, either the housing or at least one form of income would have gone through. But I end the week basically the same as I started it, except with even less cash on hand. So that is frustrating. And I haaaaate living on credit, but I did need to eat and buy train tickets this week.

*stresses and is frustrated*

In good news: I like my job! And they are test running free wi-fi on the commuter trains, so tomorrow I will experiment with bringing my netbook and seeing if I can't do some of my househunting or book-reviewing during the three hours a day I'm spending on trains these days. Because that would be awesome.