I've always liked ATK.
My stimulus check has been scheduled for payment, hooray! I feel like I should explain why I am so anxious to get it, since I am still working and should theoreticaly not need it. Well. It's kind of a long story so feel free to skip if you are not interested - it is probably very not interesting to anyone who is not me but I have to tell someone and it's pretty embarrassing so this seems like the safest place to get it all out. Anyway, I think I mentioned approximately a year ago that when I went to file my taxes I discovered that I'd had basically nothing withheld from my paychecks for Federal taxes for 2018. I suppose I should have noticed that during the year, but I did not. Nor do I know why that happened, other than tax reform changed withholding rules and I did not adjust. So that meant I owed a fuckload of taxes. So I set up an installment plan figuring if I could get those taxes paid off by this year and adjust my withholding everything would pretty much balance out. So I was paying $400/month on the installment plan, and that is a big chunk of change, and my savings dwindled and I got to where I could not quite make my full mortgage payment in the month it was due, and I kept thinking I would be able to catch up with my next paycheck but when I got paid apparently coincided with when the payment due amount would go up, and this was also the busy season at work and I just kind of...let it slide for a couple of months. And then my mortgage was sold to a new lender. So I had to call them to make any payment at all, and I couldn't make the full amount owed and they offered to let me catch up by paying 1.5x my usual payment for 6 months and then I would be caught up. Which I agreed to, because what else was I gonna do? So I have been doing that and barely scraping by on my other bills until I could not quite scrape by this month. That $1200 will let me pay my April mortgage bill on 5/1 (like I optimistically scheduled it a couple of days ago) and I very much hope allow me to pay my May bill by 5/15 and then I might actually be caught up. Oh, and btw, my withholding for 2019 was set up right to take out what I have usually owed in taxed but my tax bill was about 50% higher this year, but I'm setting up this installment plan to be a much lower monthly amount for as long as they allow the plan to get, hopefully that will work out better.
Sorry to dump a big old financial confessional on y'all.