Credit Card Victim

I took a cash advance on one of my credit cards to buy shares.

Not only did the credit card provider charge me $75 (i was expecting $25) to use the cash advance facility, I’m also paying an exorbitant interest rate.

I bought these shares cause a friend told me they were a sure thing. They went up a little then plummeted.

They have slowly clawed there way back to almost what I paid for them. If I sold them now I’d be down around $500 for my trouble.

I have a feeling they’ll climb a little higher and once I’ve covered my costs of borrowing and brokerage I hope to sell out and walk away having learnt a valuable lesson.

I wont be using credit card money to buy shares in the future.

It was such a piece of crap, was happy to get $650 for it in the end.
I know I should have paid the money straight off my credit cards, $50 bucks went to mate whose place I stored it at, he also paid for the ad and took the phone calls.
The rest I have frittered away over the last week, well that’s not totally true, got $150 left. But I haven’t touched last weeks pay yet either.

I need to get a major service on my car soon, so I won’t be making any large payments to my credit cards just yet, I’ll wait and see how much damage that does before I do anything rash like that.

The other day I recieved my first statement for my consolidation loan. Monthly interest is around $160 compared to in excess of $250 when I was carrying this debt on my credit cards. So that’s a good thing.

On the downside after four months I’ve only managed to reduce the balance by a bit over $1000.
I really need to get focussed on my debt this year.

It’s been a while since I posted here, life has got in the way a little bit. My credit cards have taken a hammering over Christmas and I’m in worse position than when I started this blog. But as always I’m working on it.

I took advantage of an offer from one of my credit card providers to balance transfer at 3.99% for six months, this will help alleviate the pressure a little bit for a while.

I’m also planning to go through my house and find everything I can sell on ebay. This might help redeem some of my excess spending for the last three months.

John Chow has written a great article explaining why 0% interest credit card offers can actually be a trap. It basically comes down to make sure you read the fine print and look for the details that aren’t in the glossy advertising.

Back here I wrote about how I’d applied for a GE Money Mastercard because they were offering a 0% interest offer. I read the fine print and realised that the 6 months was likely to be less than 3 months and didn’t go ahead with it because the money I’d save wouldn’t have left me much change after I’d paid for the stamp to apply for the transfer.

Read The Article Here

A couple of posts back I wrote about how I had taken a cash advance on my credit card to pay for another car and the plans I had to pay this back quickly.

Well it’s all fallen apart.

The extra coin I had has gone on living expenses, the domain name I was hoping to sell didn’t gather any interest, and the friend I was going to wreck my old car with has got a bit sentimental on me and won’t take a spanner to it.

This obviously calls for another plan to quickly pay off this extra credit card debt. I’ll have a good think about it and let you know what works out

I just nuked somewhere around 1700 spam comments that had been left since my last post.
There was so many that I didn’t even bother checking to see if any were real.
If you left a comment then I’m sorry and please feel free to try again.
I’m going to change the settings so that only registered users can post, sorry if that annoys anyone but I’m not prepared to waste my time on dealing with this garbage.

I’m a bad bad man.

A while back I wrote about needing another car. Well 18 months on I actually got one.

This is a good thing, my old car was fast becoming unreliable. It was at the stage I wouldn’t drive it out of the city limits for fear I couldnt afford to have it towed back for repairs. This was limiting my socialising and it had to stop.

So when I heard about a decent car with a good history become available I jumped at it.

The only downside was that I didnt have enough cash on hand to pay for it. So I took the easy option and got a cash advance on one of my recently consolidated credit cards.

Now all I need to do is pay it off, and I have a plan for that.

I have a friend who is going to help me wreck my old one, the deal is we go halves on whatever we get for it. He’s got some experience in this area, and the space to do it. Last time he wrecked a similar model he made a bit over $1000, so I’m hoping for $500, now all I have to do is come up with the other $4,500.

I have about $700 in small change that I’ve collected which will go in the bank this week, which leaves me with a bill for $3,800.

And for that little amount I’m going to try and sell one of my domain names. I posted on a board asking for a valuation a while back recieved an unsolicited offer for $US3,500. So I’m going to try and sell it for atleast that and with a little luck on the exchange rate and hopefully more than one interested buyer I’ll get more than enough to cover the cost of the new car.

So I’m really only planning to use the credit card as very short term finance, hopefully less than 60 days, and then I will have be basically in the same position as where I was, before this little indulgence.

I’ve been making payments on my consolidation loan for a month now, things are a little tight and I ought to be doing something about it, but I’m not, I’m thinking of buying a new old car and coming up with not cheap ways I can really enjoy summer.

I haven’t closed off my two zero balance credit cards yet, I’m still using them for business expenses but I’m making payments off them as soon as they appear on my online banking statement. I will do so shortly, just to need to organise some payments to go onto my one remaining credit card.

Speaking of which I had a limit increase offer the other day, to lift it from $8000 to $11,500, i put it in the bin, but I have a funny feeling all I would need to do is make a phone call and they would give it to me.

I only posted the loan agreement on Friday and two working days later I have two credit cards paid off!!!! I know have a wopping $18,000 loan to pay off over the next five years, but atleast that’s two of my credit cards gone.

They are actually beyond gone, they are in credit. The banks owe me money. but I’m sure that will disappear once the final interest payments are calculated on them.

I’m kind of excited, but daunted at the same time. Interesting times ahead !

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