Creating My Debt Graph Poster
Filed under: Debt
After seeing personal debt graphs on many of the personal finance blogs I browse, I decided to set one up for myself. I certainly plan to create one for this blog, but I didn’t want to have to log on to a computer just to get a little motivation boost from knowing that my hard work really is paying off. So I sat down tonight an created one to hang on a wall in my office.
Since the “cavewife” and I are closely watching our expenses, I decided to go cheap and creative instead of “pretty”. I could have gone all-out with a white board or cork board with sliding doodads, but this is not meant to be a product for public consumption; this is just a subtle “across-the-room” reminder of how far we’ve come and how far we have yet to go. So on the way home from the library, we stopped by the craft store and picked up a single sheet of poster board and two packages of construction paper, one red and one green. Total expenditure: $2.50 before tax.
After getting the supplies, the rest was simple - cut the construction paper into strips and join the strips together to make a “bar”. Since I was going to track 4 debts with the poster, I made 4 green and 4 red bars. To dress it up a little (and to save it from being ruined by my handwriting) I printed out some labels to describe the bars which also included the original debt amount. Once that was done, I cut the red bars to the appropriate lengths and placed them on top of the green bars.
And, “Voilà!” My personal debt graph was born.
Since I’m somewhat of a perfectionist (especially when it comes to numbers and data) I meticulously calculated the exact length the bars needed to be in inches based on the original length of 27″.
Ya, I know… I’m a little anal retentive. It’s ok; I know already. One other “feature” I added to the red bars were markers for major milestones. For each of the bars, I found the next “large, even number” that will be reached to help drive us along by reaching minor goals in search of the major goal: eliminating our debt.The only glaring problem I noticed with my solution is how to keep the red bars in place. The labels and the green bars are permanent fixtures, but the red bars will have to be pulled free for readjustment as gains are made against the debt. For now I’ve simply put a little piece of tape to the top of my red bar to hold it down. That will be sufficient for my current needs. I hope to find a more elegant solution eventually since this will likely cause damage to the poster board over time. But, again, I must remind myself that this is meant to be cheap and useful, not necessarily pretty.
Oh well, perfectionism has its costs as well, but that’s an entry for another day.
May 30th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
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September 17th, 2008 at 10:55 am
Nice idea. I like it. The cool thing about what you have created is that you can look at it whenever you want and you don’t have to be logged on to your pc to see it. It will serve as a positive reinforcing message that you are on the way out of debt.
The more positive messages we can get into our daily lives the better.