Ouch! Freakin Card 2 hit me with a $229 finance charge on Friday. I guess they don't want me to forget the importance of throwing money out the window. So I have a minimum payment of $620 due July 13th on Card 2. I expect out of all three cards in July a total minimum payment of about $1750. Not that I like paying minimums but I have been on the top 2 balances (well usually Card 1 is a min payment and I pay a couple of dollars over Card 2) so I can throw as much extra dough at Card 3 to get it eliminated as fast as possible. It works out that in balance order the interest rates are also lowest to highest so not only am I paying down the smallest balance but I'm paying down the highest interest rate at the same time. That always helps. Last month I paid over $6000 off of Card 3 to get it down to its current spot so I have been making some headway. We'll just have to keep on keepin' on with these three gremlins.
Here's the updated totals:
Debt tracker 06/16/08
Card 1: $43514.30 (8.99%)
Card 2: $31032.06 (9.99%)
Card 3: $20705.37 (11.24%)
Card 2 Finance Charge
June 16th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
June 16th, 2008 at 02:11 pm 1213625497
June 16th, 2008 at 02:23 pm 1213626184
The "Income and Savings in MS Money" post explains where a lot of it went (farther down my blog.)
Card 1 was a "Cleansweep" loan with BofA that got converted to a credit card (we don't carry it) with a limit of $49000. This balance has a fixed rate for the life of the balance. The other two are just charged up with limits of $39000 and $32000 respectively. We have always had pretty extensive limits and I have one ding on my credit report (my wife has none) but other than that our credit is clean. Our incomes are both over six figures (at least we filed on that last year) so that has helped with the limits I am assuming.
June 16th, 2008 at 06:47 pm 1213642050
We have $51,000 in debt right now and we make less than $100,000 a year. They love to give money to people with good credit (we have good credit too). Of course, we only carry one of the cards now, but it is a LONG ROAD!!!
June 16th, 2008 at 08:56 pm 1213649771
I'm stockpiling money for Hawaii so we can pay cash for the expenses of the trip but it is so tempting to take the $5400 and slam it down on the debt. Ugh!