Bye Bye Ficohsa

I haven't written in a while. I guess mainly because there wasn't much to write about. Each month was just work work work, get paid, and go on to pay my debts.

 

This month I have somewhat good news. Good news is that today I received my credit card statement from Ficohsa with 0 balance. Also today I called in to confirm I had no pending transactions. There where none. I previously had a $2000 floating transaction due to a car rental thing. It was a small headache to get it cleared away but it was gone now. Also today I entered a request to cancel my credit card.

 

I was asked why I wanted to cancel it. I wished I had told them all of the little things that I hate about them. From the way they do their billing collection (collecting two payments when only one is past due), to their crappy internet banking for credit cards. I would make payments and they would reflect one or two days later. Also this car rental floating thing. I saw the car rental lady saw my card to reverse the deposit and the slip came out with the -$2000 value on it. Yet they don't reflect it on their system.

 

I had already decided months ago to kill that card. To do that I had taken some extrafinancing on my HSBC card that was offered at a rate about half of what I had to pay on the Ficohsa card. I also took a similar amount on my BAC card (also at about half rate of Ficohsa) to pay for that card and to pay for other important things, like my daughters' school. I wish I could say I spent it all wisely but it seems like appliances, wife and kids, know when one has money and they either break, need clothes or have a birthday comming up. Just in one day I had to spend $325 on my wife's car to fix the catalitic converter and replace two tires that were damaged beyond repair during the rains.

 

In any case I managed to send it all in at the last payment day. So it's done. Well almost done. I expect a call from Ficohsa tomorrow or Friday trying to lure me back. Even if I wasn't trying to get rid of my cards, their service sucks so much that I would cancel it anyway. Even the customer rep that I talked to told me he had the same problem with the floating charges on his card and he also cancelled it. He said it wasn't right that he should say that but he has to put the face to customers and he definitely wasn't putting up with that crappy card anymore.

 

So if you want to get a really crappy card pick a Ficohsa card. Sure at first it will all be nice and dandy, but one you will have a problem and that's when their true colors will show.

 

As a recap, i'm now down to my HSBC Card and my two BAC Cards. One of them is a Gas card, which wasn't what I expected it to be. And the other is the EconoMIA card which has worked as expected. My attempts now will focus on cancelling my HSBC card. All I have on it is the extrafinancing I took to get rid of the Ficohsa card. I don't like how they calculate the payment amount, they have a weird formula each month and their statements are hard to understand.

 

I plan to take a company coop loan at 12% and do some substantial damage to that card with it. I still don't have a set date when I will do that, but I hope it's sometime before October. I have some family things that might hamper that but right now that's the plan. The thought of divorcing my wife keeps floating on my head as i've found more and more that she's not the right person for me.

 

In any case, I know now that I have to figure a way to balance my income to be able to pay for my daughters school without taking any more loans. The older one has 2 years left of high school. After that the colleges here cost less or about the same as school, but she can take less classes and the monthly payment would be lower. On a related note she was offered a full 5 year college tuition on one college here for about $4000 which is about a quarter of what the total costs would be normally. Unfortunately she doesn't like that college nor do they offer the major she wants. She is starting to look into scholarships at the college she wants and so far her grades seems to give her a good option to get at least half a scholarship to start and then maybe move to a full scholarship later. I'm really crossing my fingers for that and i'm also trying to make everything possible to help her keep those grades in these last 2 years she still has to go.

 

Well you wanted an update. You got one. So i'm still hanging in there.