u/choicemeats

Late last year I came on here with some ideas on how I was going to tackle my debt. At the time I was looking at:

• 37k CC debt (pressing)
• 9k on a private loan
• around 18k on a student loan
• taxes (at the time i wasn't sure of the amount but it tallied up to around 5200)

I was researching the idea of getting into a DMP but was unsure of it--I ended up signing paperwork with Greenpath in April. My CC debt was spread over 5 cards of between 22-27% interest but the program lowered them to betwen 10% to 0% (depending on the holder). I still carry one on my own that was low enough balance to just do myself. I wish I had started it in January or February, I would be around 2000+ deeper into repayments.

Part of my issue was recognizing I could not do this alone. I make between 100-115k so there was certainly room to pay things, even in HCOL. Mentally, though, it was just overwhelming.

Currently:

• around 35k CC (set payment)
• 4.8k left on the loan (set payment)
• 12k left on student loan (set payment)
• around 2.9k left on taxes that will have to be managed in a payment plan (whatever I can throw at it until now)

There is good news on the horizon. My seasonal work is going to start up again, usually about 1k/mo depending on how many times I'm scheduled. I have a couple of dog-sitting opportunities that will probably pay me 3-600/session. I'm hoping for a decent bonus but idk how much it would be, so I'm not counting any chickens, but I've planned about where it woudl go should it come. I also have started putting together a group to gig at weddings and other stuff, which can be pretty good if it's regular, even if its something like 250 per event, that's still 250 free money to throw somewhere.

Overall I feel a bit better. My credit score has been creeping up monthly (related to this, SOFi has a points program that gives 5pts for any raise in credit score, and although its essentially worthless for rewards its nice to receive something for it, even for the small sucess). and its nice to see my balances drop in a significant way and not have huge rebounds from interest. I'm still learning to quell some of my impulse stuff but that is MUCH better than it has been. I'm eating in regularly and taking advantage of any food from work or other offers if i can. my dad has talked somewhat about peeling off some of my inheritance to me early--i've never asked him for financial help, but any amount would be a huge boon, though I know the conversation with him will be very difficult.

overall feeling very positive

I work in video post-production and while there are a lot of AI tools on the rise for editorial, it's fairly unclear if/where agents have a spot in the producer workflow. Some of my job is budget and schedule, but alot of it is decision making based on nuances of the project, something I can't really shove off to an agent.

I've thought about a calendar agent but that's also highly variable and the outputs haven't been satisfactory and non-editable.

I did settle on one that would scrape incoming bids for the relevant information and pull it into an output schema, but it doesn't feel any faster than copy/pasting from a saved doc and plugging in numbers. What it does (which is nice) is flag any discrepancies or missing info, which is definitely helpful, but it doesn't really save me any time. But i guess the directive is to show that we're using it? Idk. It just seems like a waste, although I'm learning a lot about it.