Stacking Chips, Tens and Hundreds of Dollars at a Time

Hey everyone.
So in the past two days, I made $600 from legal work and the way that I allocated that money was as follows: $100 towards my credit card bill (I now have a balance of $961), $100 toward my 2013 tax bill (I now have a balance remaining of $1,100), $110 towards my professional liability insurance bill, $50 towards my Roth IRA, $25 towards my regular investment account, $40 towards tithes, leaving me with $75 in checking until the next time I receive money. Which will be tomorrow.

Currently, I make about $150 a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. I aspire to make $300 a day next year, which will put me in the six figure income bracket. $300 a day translates into $109,500 a year. Having more income means that you can save more. I advocate saving anywhere from 7 - 15% of your income, even when you have credit card debt. However this is only provided that your credit card debt is $1,000 or less. When your credit card debt starts to creep above $1,000, that's when credit card interest really starts to burn a hole in your pocket.

I do agree with financial talking heads that one should pay off credit card debt as aggressively as possible. However, I believe that there is a place for saving, no matter how small your income is, if you have credit card debt at $1,000 or below. I believe that if you have credit card debt above $1,000, you should use 90% of your money allocation for savings/investing to pay it down and just save 10% of the amount you would normally have saved. (Example: You have $5,000.00 in credit card debt. You were originally planning to save $250 per month. Instead of saving that entire $250, use $225 of it to pay down your credit card debt and allocate $25 towards your savings.)

The reason that you are not using the entire $250 to pay down your credit card debt is because having some reserve makes it less likely that you will have to rely on your credit card to fund future purchases. And for me, I feel much richer when I can look at my bank statement and see money in my account/see that I'm a member of the investor class, as opposed to calling a loan company representative and hearing how much debt I've paid off.

As I've mentioned in my previous post, my most immediate goal is $10,000 in savings/investments by the end of the year. After getting $1,000 in savings/investments, the next major milestone, in monetary terms is $10,000. The reason for that is primarily psychological for me, but I also feel as if $10,000 allows one the ability to make a significant investment in an individual stock or several stocks. By significant, I mean that the amount of capital you invest in a stock can generate a nice bit of money if the investment doubles. (If you buy 2 shares of a $200 stock, and it doubles, you've made $400. But if you buy 200 shares of a $200 stock, and it doubles, you've made $40,000.)

When making purchases for my own stock portfolio, I usually buy in amounts of $500. That is to say, I usually invest $500 at a time. Although it's not a lot, I believe that waiting until I have $500 to invest forces me to take time to evaluate the merits of each investment I purchase. Speaking of investments, as of today, my investment account stands at $1,341.41, with $1,210.12 of that being in my Roth IRA and the remaining $131.29 in my regular investment account. I made $14.36 today in my 2 shares of  BIDU and $6.15 in my 3 shares of LMT for a total of $20.51. My portfolio is down .3% and I started my portfolio at the beginning of September.

At any rate, I think that's more than enough for a post. I hope to see everyone again soon and thanks for reading.