Well I had about $371 and change left in the old checking account so I made an additional payment on Card 1 for $351 leaving $20 just in case I forgot something. I don't ever have anything auto withdraw from my account so I believe I'll be fine (and I can withdraw my last $20 via ATM and close the accounts over the phone). I also forgot to add back the finance charge on Card 7 so the amount is actually a little bit higher (the finance charge was $37). So I'll update it below:
Card 1/$8691/$20000/14.23
Card 2/$15000/$31000/12.24
Card 7/$5821/$11000/4.99*
Card 13/$4001/$4500/5.82*
*Balance Transfer Rate
A heck of a lot easier to look at when it's only four cards!
More debt tracker payments
April 4th, 2007 at 02:18 pm
April 4th, 2007 at 02:49 pm 1175698178
April 4th, 2007 at 07:54 pm 1175716488
April 5th, 2007 at 01:25 am 1175736306
Now that the loan is a "term" loan with "term" limits it will belong in a completely different category than revolving unsecured credit card debt with no "terms". It will be going into the "must-have" category since it now has a fixed monthly payment amount. We know for sure we have a $75.000 disbursement from the s-corp (POST-Tax) coming at the end of the year so the loan will probably not last more than 9 or 10 months but I didn't want to get into that either at this point. I think the most important thing people need to take from this is that it doesn't make sense to carry 80k across that many cards with double digit interest rates (conso really will help save you from interest charges).
So I think for now it's going to stay as-is. If I do end up wiping out the other cards left on the matrix then the debt tracker will only encompass the term debts (mortgage and conso loan) and then I could probably revisit the situation but for now the "debt tracker" is just going to focus on getting the credit cards to 0 (which the loan did).
April 5th, 2007 at 01:01 pm 1175778091
April 5th, 2007 at 02:22 pm 1175782958
$33,513 is what is left on the credit card balances. I think once the cc's get down to zero the debt reduction tracker will shift focus to the term loans (mortgage and conso loan) and that same amount I had been throwing to debt before can go towards paying down the conso loan. Since the conso loan is at 8.99 percent I really need to focus on paying down cards 1 and 2 before putting extra money at the loan (since the APR's are higher). I also want to attack card 13 since the balance to limit is high (for FICO you want the low utilization). I will be adding some information to the blog today as far as income in (since payday was yesterday!) and where the money is going to.
The thing to remember about the conso loan is that in comparison to the interest we were paying and the number of payments I had to make (much less keep track of) it really will save us in the long run. We got the APR we wanted (single digit and the lowest allowed by this bank for this loan), we got it unsecured (not tied to the house like a HELOC) and it has no prepayment penalties (so we can pay it off in full when we are ready to). It's also from a prime bank (Bank of America) so it doesn't look like anything other than a line of credit to our other creditors. It will also appear like an installment loan rather than a revolving line which will also help us FICO wise when it comes to revolving utilization.
For us it just made a lot of sense and we are getting a lot of positives out of it. I don't have a due date yet for the first payment but when I do it will get top billing as far as when it gets paid on the main blog page.
April 11th, 2007 at 03:36 am 1176262591
But I think you should add your consolidation loan into your debt total because if you "forget" about it and think you've licked it, its the first stage of slipping. And you can't slip now - the stakes are too big. Your life has eased a bit, but only a bit. You've got to figure out how you got into deep water and whatever you do, don't do what you did!
April 11th, 2007 at 03:01 pm 1176303697