As of 3/4/2010 Part 1

Ok I finally took the plunge and wrote down on the right side of my blog the amounts I owe as of today on each of my credit cards and the personal loan.

 

I'm shocked, and confused, and now embarrased but facing my problems.

 

First of all I know the balances I wrote now are right. I had all the documents to check them. So i'm surprised to see that Citibank and Promerica are so similar as to what they were in October 2008. So I went back to check my Promerica payment plan and it seems I was still having trouble disclosing all that I owed back then.

 

Now i'm better at it but probably still have to go. So to force myself. I'm going to write down what I had wrote down in 2008 and what my records say that I really owed in 2008.

 

This is what I had written

 

As of 10/05/2008
Credit Card One $6651
Credit Card Pro $6000
Credit Card Cr1 $9829
Credit Card Cr2 $1589
Credit Card HS $5485 ($300/mo)
Personal Loan $6458

 

This is more accurate of october 2008:

Credit Card One $6460 (about $200 less, maybe I was using the previous month's numbers)
Credit Card Pro $8890 ($2890 MORE than what I wrote before. I either just guess it or tried to fool myself and you).

Credit Card Cr1 $9829 (checks out, balance plus extrafinancing)
Credit Card Cr2 $1589 (checks out, just balance)
Credit Card HS $6930(About $1500 higher than post previously and I really don't know why I wrote that number before, it's just strange because it had no basis.)
Personal Loan $6777 (About $300 MORE, maybe I was using the previous month's numbers.

 

I've corrected the numbers on the right side of the blog, but I left the previous numbers here as a reminder of what I had wrote before. I was going to write about how I felt about each debt and how it had evolved but I had confirm the 2008 numbers first. I see that most of them were about right but the Promerica debt was much much higher and I really don't know why I wrote less. I either used bad numbers to start, bad math when converting to dollars or bad judgement in trying to look like I owed less than I did. Right now I can't remember now I felt back then about disclosing my finances.

 

I apologize if I have hidden some of the facts of my situation. I've corrected that and I hope from now on to give you the right numbers for all this.

 

This really hasn't been a good week for me financially yet this disclosure has helped. Thanks to all those who write in with their comments and their tough love for me. I really appreciate it.

 

Thanks

 

July or August, write it down.

I went to pay my HSBC card today. lps 7,1000 . About 5000 went to interest. I hate that and it's all money that I will never see again but I keep telling myself this is just more and more of a reminder to me about not going so deep in debt in the future with nothing to show for.

 

With HSBC there is no negotiating, they want me to pay their credit card rates or pay the full amount. I can't do the second right now so I'm just paying the minimum until I can hit it with more.

 

So as I was driving back I was thinking about which cards I will cancel when I can. I have two cards with BacBamer, one with HSBC, one with Promerica, one with Citibank and the latest one with Ficohsa.

 

The BacBamer ones are the oldest ones and the ones with the most benefit to me, although lately the've become a bit tougher but I can understand given my recent payment history. I would probably keep those in my desk drawer for travel or for medical emergencies.

 

Ficohsa card is one i'm using for business transactions and it has an extrafinancing on it that is basically paying itself from the selling of Honduran goods to relatives in the US. So I would probably keep that in the short term but would let it go or keep paying the full balance when I get down to 0.

 

HSBC is going to go. I don't want to have to deal with them ever again. They aren't bad, they just don't care about me as a customer. Even a replacement card took two months and I just took it to cash my points with them.

 

Promerica and Citibank are the cards on arranged payment schedule. Meaning that i've talked with them and told them that I want a payment plan and then I would want to turn in the cards.

 

Promerica was very quick with that and I don't even get a CC statement, it's totally turned into a loan now. However the last time I was trying to see if I could extend my payment term to them they pulled a different number than I had, about 4000lps higher. I think I will come into their office with my receipts and settle the number before it's too late. This card will go too. They've been nice with customer service and everything but for some gut reason I hate them. It must be the 8000lps I have to come up with every month to pay because they gave only 36 months to pay back instead of 48 like Citibank.

 

Citibank cut me the same deal, however they keep sending me CC statement and actually turn my payment plan into an extrafinancing. So they seem to want to keep me as a customer. However that was probably back when it was Banco Uno. Lately I've seen them become more like HSBC. They want their money and little room for negotiation, period. I can understand that but I don't like it so they are going to go too.

 

So the reason for the title is that I was checking my balance on my company coop loan and the expected balances on my "loans" from Promerica and Citibank. It seems that on either July or August I can request a new loan for about 120,000lps, which wouldn't affect the take home pay amount I have right now (previous loan was 118,000). WIth that money I could pay the balance on the previous coop loan, which is a requirement, and I would have almost the exact amount to pay either Citibank or Promerica, for some reason they will both have balances of about 75 to 80k lps at about that time.

 

Going the completely opposite way of how I was going about two posts ago. I'm thinking I want to pay Promerica. even if they say I owe them a couple thousand lempiras more in late fees or so, I could still pull that from my emergency fund and be done with them. That would free up 8,000lps a month to:

 

1- Get back on schedule with Citibank (currently one month behind every month), this would take about a month and a half

 

2- Pay more towards HSBC and get rid of them ASAP.

 

3- Save more in my emergency fund and freedom accounts

 

I could pay Citibank back instead of being tied to them for another two years but that would only lower my outgoing cash flow by 5,000.00 , and i'm always a bit concerned as to how long I will be able to keep the morning job. Not that I'm bad at it, but since i'm on contract it would be easy for them to let me go.

 

I sure appreciate your comments and they definitely don't fall on deaf ears.

 

Thanks

 

 

Bad Good news and I need help with a decision

Your prayers were answered.

 

Remember that credit card that I was offered that gave me 10% discount on fuel and restaurants? Most of your comments were against me having taking it and were warning me to pay it in full every month.

 

Well worry no more! I was turned down by the credit card company, wohoo!!! Really i'm happy about this. I called customer service today because I hadn't heard from that card anymore. They told me my application was rejected. I wasn't even sad, well a little but mostly I was relieved of the temptation of having it.

 

So I request to be transfered to the collections department. I recently made payment #19 out of 36, meaning that I had paid more than half of the debt. It was originally 181,685.27 and according to the payment schedule I owe them now 107,673.92. As with most leveled payment types of repayment the first part of the schedule is very interest heavy so most of the payment goes down to pay just interest. It's my "punishment" for having gotten into the situation i'm trying to get out of.

 

Anyway, I asked the collections guy if I could refinance my payment schedule to increase the term. He checked and said that he dealt with people that were behind in their payments and I wasn't showing up on his screen, so I was probably on schedule. However he had me wait on the phone and went to talk to the ones that deal with people on schedule that want to reorganize their debt, I figure not too many. He came back a few minutes later and told me that I could in fact do that since I was more than halfway done with my current payment plan. I could probably add another 12 months to it, I just had to go to the same office when I went to do the first payment schedule and request the extension. He said I would probably need to make another payment of the current schedule as a down payment on the new one.

 

So, my question to you is? should I try to keep paying with my current payment schedule which is a monthly payment of L 8,020.00 (about $400) or should I try to reduce it by extending the term, thus being in debt for a longer period but improving my monthly cash flow ?

 

In my current state I still have 17 payments to go at L 8,020.00 to go from 107,673.93 to zero with a interest rate of 33%

 

If I were to refinance and if the interest rate were to stay the same I would have 28 payments to go (17 of the current plan minus one taken as down payment on the new one plus 12 months on the new one) at 33% to pay about 100,000.00. WIth my loan calculator this comes one to a monthly payment of L. 5,404.01

 

Honestly I have thought about this and have considered toughing it out until I really couldn't pay anymore at the current values. Mostly because right now i'm on the side of the payment that would put more money towards capital than to interest and would end this debt it about a year and a half. While if I refinance I would obviously pay more interest because I would keep paying for another two years and a half, almost back to where I started although at a lower debt amount.

 

The reasons i'm considering a refinance now are the hope of a lower interst rate, less pressure on me to work enough hours each month to make the payments, and more opportunities to save money now that i've learned to do that.

 

Right now i'm usually able to cover this payment at the current value, although sometimes it's straining because I don't have enough money in my emergency funds to comfortably cover one of those payments if my paychecks are late.

 

I did learn one thing, they do refinance payment schedule for people that are behind on their payment, so I could wait until I'm really behind and request a refinance until then, hopefully it won't get to that but that's one ace up my sleeve if it's still available in the future.

 

On other news, my Citibank card (also on a repayment plan) charged me the yearly membership of their credit card, about $70. I tried as last year to have them reverse that but this time I got a negative. They said I should pay up the full amount I owe them and then they could reverse the charges. Sure I can come up with Lps 90,047.00 by the end of this month (no not really, unless I did something very drastic!!). So with them I plan to reach a good point on my coop loan when I can take some 100,000.00 lps out and just blast my Citibank debt and close that account. They have nothing i'm interested in and they have been very tricky ever since I remember.

 

My HSBC debt would've been the one I would've prefered to pay first because it's at a higher interest rate but I have to take one or the other. It is one of my goals for this year to be able to pay one of those high debts. I think that would really make a different in my snowball repayment plan.

 

I hope to hear what you have to say about this.

 

 

Pay Raise and Bonus (or is it?)

Wednesday noon I got my salary transfered to my bank account. It was strange because it was only the 24th but then I remember that this month has only 28 days.

 

Later in the day we got called into my boss's office. He went on to explain that we would get a salary "adjustment" to match inflation. We'll, that's usually what we get every year so no news there.

 

But wait! there's more. We are also going to get a Bonus pay on July, not the one required by law but something extra that is called a vacation bonus. For a normal employee it would mean that when they go on vacation they would also get a bonus payment to probably pay for whatever they are going to do while on vacation.

 

In my case it doesn't apply because I can't take a lot vacation time. My boss knows this and yet he complains to me that I have too much vacation time pending, I have almost 50 days of vacation time. I requested 2 weeks and then I wanted to change it to 3 weeks and he said no. Only two weeks because X person was comming over , or Z proyect needs my supervision and that later in the year I could take another two weeks. and so on. Great, in the meantime i'm accumulating another 20 days of vacation time so next year we'll be in the same spot.

 

Anyway. The bonus. So we are told it's 50% of our normal monthly pay. Great news right? Wrong. It's just a juggling act with the numbers. Our pay "adjustment" was already budgeted for this year for some time already. But we had complained that our sister company that doesn't actually provide any services or generates anything close to the level of income that we do, have that bonus payment.

 

Our boss had told us that he had been told they didn't have that benefit, but one of their employees came down one day and talking about something else we came to that subject and she disclosed in full how they get that bonus. So that was a little help for us.

 

Our boss had been juggling with the idea of giving us a pay adjustment or a bonus but not both. So the day before the big annoucement he had me come into the office to help him with some math and I figured out what he was going to do. I think he let me know because i'm the #2 in the company but still i'm not the one calling the shots so it felt awkward to know how the trick was pulled.

 

He was going to take the bonus from the already budgeted raise and have our pay adjustment be the difference. So if someone was going to get a 7% increase in their pay, now they would get only a 4% increase and the 3% (times 14, the number of montly payments we get each year) would be the "bonus" for July.

 

So from an administrative point I think it was a cool idea to keep the budget from increasing. And my coworkers were happy to get the adjustment AND the bonus. But for me who knew how the trick was pulled it was a bit of a letdown.

 

I guess the good side of this is that it's a forced saving for me, and so when I get that bonus I will be more interested in spending it wisely (probably paying bills or school for my girls).

 

I guess like they say, I shouldn't have watched how that sausage was made.

 

I think we already got the raise but i'm not exacting sure how much take-home pay I will get. I'm planning on request most of that raise be automatically sent to my emergency fund.

 

I already increased the savings to that account to 2000lps each quincena and i'm saving 600lps on the freedom account too. I managed to do that by taking the amount that we got deducted in january and may for municipal taxes and divert it to those accounts.

 

I'm totally surprised at how one can manage to live on the amount of money we get to take home. I remember when I started saving 200lps on my emergency fund and now i'm saving ten times that amount and still make it to every payday. Or well almost, sometimes I do dip into it but it's still growing.

 

I gotta write another post about how i'm doing with paying debt. This is already long enough.

 

 

Feeling down

I was recently changed the schedule of my anti-anxiety meds in the process of trying to wean me out of them. Unfortunately the adjustment phase means I have some periods where I do experience anxiety, usually mornings and early evening as it's about when the effect is wearing out.

 

That plus the actual problems of every day life and of trying to get out of debt with a family that is 50% behind me makes it more difficult than usual to get thru the day without feeling sorry for myself and just plaining cry out of despair.

 

The only good thing I guess is that I know it's my brains abnormal reaction to events that otherwise I wouldn't really let them get to me. I feel the morning chill down my spine and the urge to just sit there and let time go by when I know I have a ton of stuff to do, the urge to to repeat a motion like stroking an arm or hair just because it's a natural stress releiver. All the signs of the onset of an anxiety attack. Fortunately it never materilizes either because I take my med in the following minutes or because by recognizing it I make it go away.

 

In any case I just felt like pointing out because I imagine that some people might not just be fighting with debt but also fighting with the feelings that come from debt. The exhaustion of thinking about saving on everything all the time. The guilt when splurging on something or paying more than expected. etc.

 

And it's the crappy little things of every day like a car that runs rough, heavy traffic in a place that usually has none. More user support requests than usual. Hard to solve problems from bosses, calls for help when trying to get some peaceful time, etc. It's easy to let it pile on if one is not aware tha it's a mental issue.

 

So if you are feeling overwhelmed by things around, it might be time to get some mental help. I know I could have all of this feelings go away by increasing my med dose, but then I wouldn't be moving forward in trying to stop taking it. I could also wait until I don't have debt or problems and stop my medication then, but I do have a plan to get rid of my debt, however problems will always be there, it's part of my job and part of life.

 

Darn, I have to finish this software deploy, answer phones and print reports. See you later.

Double payday!

In my last post I was writing that my morning job payments were comming in a little delayed. Well, my payment from Jan 1 to Jan 15 was VERY delayed. It arrived today, 15 days after I sent the invoice.

 

However it seems they also included payment for the invoice I sent YESTERDAY. I still have to add both invoices and figure it out but from the amount I got It does seem like that's what they did.

 

Now comes my dilema. Should I keep asking them about my payment each time or should I accept their "forced monthly" payment scheduled? I hate asking for my payment. It's not like they ask me for my work over and over. But my debt re-payment schedule is set to work with two payments per month from them and changing it would surely make it complicated for me since I would get behind payment on some of those debts.

 

Now I have to go off and make payments. It's not as fun as going shopping but getting that payment number crossed from the payment plan sure feels good.

 

Have a GREAT day!

Playing with Fire

Well today I got a call from Promerica. It's the bank with which I arranged to turn in my credit card and start a debt repayment schedule. I'm about halfway with them of the 36 months's term.

 

I thought it would be one of those calls reminding me that I was a few days behind my payment. I've been getting my morning job payments a bit late and so I get called on it and even threatened to be taken to legal department if I miss two payments. I really don't want to but sometimes the money is not there when it's due. Lately i've been mostly on time in keeping only 30 days late.

 

My surprise was even bigger when I hear someone talking to me in a happy voice from the "credits" deparment instead of the "collections" department. That was strange.

 

Right away they told me that due to my "good customer record with them"...I almost laughed out loud but I managed to keep it a a grin...they were offering me a credit card that would give me 5% back on fuel purchases and 10% back on restaurant purchases.

 

My first instinct as has been with the previous 5 or 10 calls from other companies offering me credit cards, insurance, lines of credit, etc was to say no.  However I thought about it and considered that lately i've been able to carry one or two credit cards in my wallet and actually NOT use them even when I was very short on money.

 

Here the two sides of my mind started playing with me. One side says "just say no, stay the course". The other side says "you spend at least 4000lps on fuel alone each month, that's 200lps back each month"..then it added "On weekends you spend between 200 and 800lps, you could get back 20 to 80 lps back".

 

So after asking about interest rates and other fees, of which I was told there are none, I told them to go ahead and mail the card to me.

 

I'm going to play it slow and request it to have a credit limit of $500 even if they give me $5500 like on the one i'm paying back now. I'm going to use an actual can I have here and put the gas money there or go to their office to deposit the money after every couple of purchases. If I find myself not paying the full amount I will stop using it and put it on my office drawer until I get the balance back to zero.

 

I know I'm playing with fire but I think i'm taking enough steps to make sure I don't get third degree burns today, maybe I might get something like a sunburn but I hope that it will actually help me save.

 

Let me hear what you think.