I cut up my credit card this evening. It all started at about 6:00PM today; a young man came over to our apartment to purchase one of my guitars that I don't really play. I got a cool five hundred for it, and that's pretty sweet. Anyways, I drove over to the local bank to deposit the cash... you know, so that I'm not carrying a whole bunch of money on me. In goes the card... nothing... What, the, heck. I look at the screen of the ATM and it's now flashing "This machine is currently unavailable" at me. "Strange," I think to myself. Of course, while I'm reading this my card pops part way out and then goes back in like some sort of taunting schoolyard bully. "Ha-ha" the ATM seems to be saying in a Nelson Muntz-esque sort of way. I wonder if I can get that card out, so I dig another card out of my wallet and poke it in behind my card... keeping a firm grip on it the whole time so as not to lose a second piece of plastic to the bastard machine. No love. So on the phone I get to my lovely banking institution, since it is after hours. Of course there is no option for this type of an issue, so I get to mash zero until I get a human. That is my preferred method of dealing with automated phone systems, by the way, mash zero until something happens. Anyways, I get a human on the phone and explain my predicament. She offers to cancel the debit card so that if it kicks out in the later on it won't be scammable by any bastard with the time and inclination to try to guess my PIN. Since they were doing this, she mentions, that I won't be able to access any banking services tied to that card until I get a new one, so if there's any online banking I wanted to do later I should arrange this through her. Done! I need to pay my electric bill, so lets do that while you're here. Then of course while this human was digging around in my accounts she notices my rather substantial Credit Card debt. Le sigh. Yes I have that. "What are your plans for this debt?" she asks me, innocently, though I'm pretty sure that she's going to try to sell me something, and honestly, I'll buy it if it will help with the debt. "I plan on paying it, I suspect," are my approximate words in reply. I should state for the record, that I actually have pretty okay credit. This is kind of surprising considering how abysmal my money management skills are. I should take a hint from the blog of someone I know, and learn how to take care of this stuff better. The reality of it is that budgets piss me off. Watching numbers on a spreadsheet may be really helpful in seeing the problems, but I don't think they fully address the habits that cause the problem in the first place. So the human bank phone person says, why don't we see what we can do to lower your payments, interest rate, and time you have before you're debt "free" (quotes are mine). So we talk about lines of credit, loans, and other options. Transferring my balance to another card would be foolish, because other cards also have ridiculous interest rates, or low rates for limited periods of time. I won't really qualify for a line of credit of the scale necessary, so maybe a loan would be in order. Also, how about a TFSA (Tax Free Savings Account, for those who aren't aware) while we're at it? Good Idea, I think. "That sounds pretty okay," I say. The Loan interest would be less than half of the Interest I currently pay, and the bi-weekly payment would be less than I currently pay, and I'd be paid off in 5 years instead of 25 with the credit card. And this is a pretty sweet step in the right direction. I'll probably be running this by that aforementioned blogger too. I have a lot of respect for her skills (Dolla' dolla Skillz, Yo!)
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