Eerie feelings

Last night as I was at the bank I felt such an eerie feeling. Here I was paying some debt on my cellphone card and yet I owed this bank a lot of money on my main card and my personal loan. I was thinking that at any minute the teller would get a warning on her screen to call up the supervisor to talk to me.

At least that's how it felt the last time when I wanted to cash in my points for money and the teller DID have to call the supervisor and he told me I was past due on something and the system wouldn't accept cashing my points because of that.

Eerie I tell you...very eerie for me. Being objective i'm sure these folks have gone thru this millions of times, telling people about stuff the system won't let them do because the are missing payments, or past due, overdrawn, overlimit, etc.

Then as I walked out from the banks area of the mall into the main Hall I could feel all the stores with their big posters of 50% discounts, 80% discounts (yeah right)...and all the stuff I really didn't need. I only went into one store (book store) and managed to hold of my temptation to buy something there. That led me to think about writing tips on saving money just as I experience them. One of those post will come up soon, I already have it drafted.

I also watched people with bags of purchases and wondered which of these people were going down my path and which were actually able to afford the things they were buying. Honestly I felt like I was the lone idiot that was nose-deep in debt and everyone else is paying cash or debit card. I know it's not like that, but thats how I felt at the time. Very, very, lonely.

Oh well, at least I payed all that had been charged on my cellphone card. Damn card, how come you had to be the one to be really good and be on the bank that I owe so much money to ?

Good night

Well at least this blog is free

Staying the course

Payday came and went, and the money came in and was out the door.

Not only do I have to pay the rent on my house, but this month is specially hard because I have to pay the taxes on my car. It's 3,600 lempiras or about $190. $190 that I could've used to pay some debt. Anyway taxes ARE debt owed to the government so I will pay that tomorrow (last day for that car).

Some updates are that I'm staying the course in paying $300 monthly on the first credit card I told you about. I'm less than $90 to go to pay it this month. This money should come from some more work i'm doing for my ex brother-in-law.

About each week I get around $180 from his company as a commission for goods purchased here and shipped to the US....hmmm I haven't told you about that. That's on top of the $200 he pays me monthly. That's pretty much all going to paying debts and stuff I owe. Unfortunately not all of it goes to debt because there's always something unexpected and my emergency fund is usually depleted.

Also the cellphone card i'm going right now to pay all the charges that have been applied to it this month. I got the bank statement with the minimum payment set at 2,300 lps so i'm setting that card to a $130 monthly payment AFTER paying whatever charges are applied to it from my cellphone company. So after paying today I have to come up with $130 for that card to stay the course to pay it. I'm set on paying this debt or as fast as I can because it's the lowest. Then I would just try to pay the cellphones BEFORE they are charged to the card.

I still have to come up with money to pay my personal loan and my main credit card. Plus I have to come up with about $600 to pay the 2 credit cards with which I already have a payment schedule arranged.

I hope to finish up some work for this lady that I told you in an earlier post. I have to put in hours of work to get to 10,000 lps $525 so I can bill her for that as soon as possible. I'm trying to get that work done but it's been difficult due to family stuff. I'm supposed to have mornings off but I keep running errands and them i'm racing off to work in the afternoon. I guess I'll work late tonight.

Well i'm off to the bank before they close. I'll write about my saving angels next time...if it wasn't for them I don't know how much worst I would be.

Some Financial Oxygen

If I had a huge source of income, having all this debt wouldn't be a problem. It's not having all that income that causes problems for me. Thus I'm always looking for other sources of income.

Today I got somewhat good news.

I have been doing some freelance work for a company. This year I have been billing them almost monthly. When I presented my bill in May they gave a big run around saying that the general manager needed to talk to me.

July came and still no money. I finally got to talk with the general manager and she said that the board of directors was concern over how much money they were paying me and that they wanted to work something out with me to lower my billing to them.

I explained to her that I was willing to switch to a montly billing instead of a per hour billing. I would lower my equivalent per hour fee by about 33%. She would have a way to lower her bill and budget my cost and I would get a scheduled income as opposed to a every-now-and-then check.

She said she would take it into consideration and paid me that last bill. I quickly paid some of the monthly bills I had back then and did some purchases and bought some medications. I know I spent most of it on debt payments so I feel good about that. My wife wanted much more that what I ended up giving her. She still doesn't grasps how much I really do owe, or doesn't want to face it.

Today, the general manager calls to tell me that she hasn't made up her mind yet but that she needs me to do some work for the company and that I can bill her by the hour but if I could please lower my rate. I told her I would lower a bit it but not to the level I would if she payed on a monthly basis. She agreed and quickly sent me some work I had to do for next week.

So I hope I can do this work and be able to bill her soon enough to pay some of my debt specially my mom and the cellphone card so I can finish off those debts and focus on the other ones.

I also hope that she will eventually agree to pay me monthly instead of hourly. She and I go way back. I've been doing work for her for more than 10 years, but only since about 2003 have I been working as close and with such an importance to her company's daily operations.

She can't really hire me since she couldn't afford my full salary, but she is ok with the arrangement we have. My offer to her was to be even more close in contact with her company and onsite on her 3 locations (Tegucigalpa, San Pedro Sula, and La Ceiba). She said it was an interesting proposition since she was downsizing her company and need more part-time asistance rather than a full time person there.

What do you think about this ? Right now as I'm writing this my computer is churning up some of the work she asked me for next week. I will keep working this weekend. At the same time I'm monitoring another task i'm doing for a US company (more on that later). Well, the computer is done. Time for me to get back to work.

Well, at least this blog is free.

The worst, the bad, the good and the best

The worst: I have this big personal loan that I have to pay. I got it 20 months ago as a way to lower my main credit card bill because I had run it up trying to help my wife start up a clothing store in a street market in the city. I funded her business twice and eventually all I got from that was this big debt. I took a loan at 24% to pay this balance on my main credit card. Since then I failed to keep my main credit card in zero balance. Now I have this loan AND the credit card balance. I hate myself for having done this so many times now that it's so embarrasing to admit to making the same stupid mistake so many times.

The bad: I'm on payment 20 out of 48. Yet another debt to add to all the money I owe. Amount owned at the moment: $6458. Current monthly payment is $311. Will I be able to make this month's payment?..stay tuned cause I certainly don't know if I will get payed for some extra work that i've been doing or for some extra work that I quoted to do on a monthly basis.

The good: Ironically the good part is that I got a letter from that bank stating that they were going to rate my interest rate due to the new regulations including the monetary policy rate. The new rate will be 29% So my new monthly payments would be $325, a $15 increase. Not that much but it's an increase.

So how is this good? Well the letter included an opportunity for me to extend my loan term up to 60 months. So today, actually just a few minutes ago (i'm still aching from walking to the bank branch), I went there and ask for my loan term to be extended to 60 months. The customer service agent said that normally they would extend my loan to 60 months from the date it was originally created. So if the request goes thru normally I would start next month be now on payment 21 out of 60 (or 1 out of 40). New monthly payment would be $257. $54 less per month but obvioulsy I would end up paying more interests in the long run.

However right now I'm just trying to get all my payments within my budget and I would be hard pressed to get a lower rate loan that this one even at 29%. So I took this offer.

The best: I asked the agent if they could actually refinance my loan to 60 months starting from today, not from 20 months ago. He wrote that in my refinance request. If it does go thru this way, I would have just started with a new loan of 60 months to pay for the $6458 at 29%. Monthly payments would be $207. About $104 less per month.

Again I would obviously pay more in interests but in a year or two when I (hopefully) have payed other debts and have more money available I can ask them to shorten my loan term and I'm sure they would be happy to do so. Otherwise I could still get a shorter term in another bank or in the end save up the extra money in an account in their bank and when I reach the balance due, pay it all at once. That will be a very happy day for me.

On the income front, my wife went to job agency today and got letters to visit a bank and a drug company to see if they can hire her. She went to a retail department store about two weeks ago and she has called them every other day and they tell her they will schedule her for tests soon, but still nothing solid.

In the mean time, I have one credit card payment that is already late. I've payed part of it. I have this loan that it's payment was due yesterday, so I hope that even with the late payment they still approve at least the "good" part.

The real hits will come in about a week when I have to pay my main credit card and the minimum payment (lempiras + dollars) is about $650. By then I probably won't have that amount of money so the payment will be past due. I hope by then that this loan refinance will have gone thru (it's the same bank) positively. Either way I will then call or go in and ask them to cancel my credit card and set up a payment schedule for me.

To think that the operations manager of this bank is in the board of directors of my company gives me all kinds of thoughts. Would he help me with a better loan to cover what I owe to his bank? or would he stand by the banks procedures and not help me. Would he keep quiet about my situation or would he eventually talk about it with my boss (who is not only work related but also a friend of him)?

I know that he is a straight man and respect procedures. I know he also helps when he can. I worry that if I ask him for help and explain my situation he might just say that it's out of his hands since my problem is with the credit/loan department and not the operations department. I then would worry that with his inability to help me but knowledge of my problem and how it would affect his bank, that he would talk to my boss about it. I have heard them talk about people running up credit card debt so many times that I would probably pass out in his office if he started asking me questions about that. I have no clue what would they would want to do with/to me.

Pray for the "best" out of this loan. Pray for my wife getting a job SOON. Thank you!

Well, at least this blog is free. ...sounds like this could be my signature from now on.

The good card

The picture above is of a card. It's not a credit card it's actually a prepaid card.

 

They started showing up in a restaurant chain a few months ago. Back then I thought it was wise to put money on a card that you would have to use only on certain restaurants.

 

However one day as I was buying fried chicken the cashier explained something to me. She said that for every 100 lempiras you prepay they load up the card with 120 lempiras. That's like getting 20 lempiras (about 1 dollar) "free". So right there I was going to pay 360 lempiras for chicken, I got the card and payed just 300 (the card itself is free to get). So it's like getting a 20% discount

 

The other good thing is that this card works in several different restaurants. You can look at the picture and see the logos and names of each. I will sum it up for you here: One burger chain, 3 chicken chains, 1 pizza chain, 1 donut chain, 1 ice cream chain, and another restaurant that I can't categorize since i haven't gone to it yet.

 

In any case it's nice since there are options to choose for everyone in the family.

 

Personally, I don't really load it up that much, just 100 or 200 every time (rounding off whatever I have to pay). Eventually some meals are "free" or "on the card" and I don't have to take out any money from my pocket.

 

We eat out on weekends so as you can imagine I usually "suggest" that we eat in any of these restaurant chains so that the meals can be cheaper for me. Plus they all usually have "value meals" that are smaller size. This is also good for our waistline :-)

 

Ok, enough good things, i'm ready to continue telling about my 2 other big debts. Will post about them soon.

 

 

Wealth or Health ?

I was trying to come up with a subject to write about in between the pains of writing about my debts.

 

Well, life tends to be funny in some ways and sad in others.

 

Wednesday my boss went home early because he felt ill. Thursday he didn't show up for work as he had a fever running.

 

Today we got a call from his wife that he was in a local hospital after spending the night in the ER. Apparently his blood pressure medicine had a bad interaction with the medications for his cold/cough/fever.

 

Here I am worrying about my debts and how I'm going to pay for them. I am right in being concerned about it. I wish I hadn't made the mistakes I did. I really feel bad about it, bad to the point of crying about it sometimes. Really! I just can't do it in front of anyone.

 

However I should also be grateful I have relatively good health. My boss has money and lots of it. Right now i'm sure he would pay a lot to be as healthy as I am (and i'm not 100%). Besides even with our medical insurance he will probably pay a lot of money for all of his checkups and tests and labs and hospital room and ER and doctor bills.

 

I called him tonight and he sounded so tired and really depressed. He said they hadn't figured out what was wrong with him, and that he would go somewhere else to get checked again. SO, he'll probably spend more money on repeating tests and doc appointments, etc.

 

So, as everybody says, I rather have my health than being sick and have wealth.

 

Also I prefer my debt with health that sickness and NO wealth!

 

The ideal of course would be great health and wealth.

 

have a good night. Please pray for me, my family, our health and maybe not wealth but at least pray for me to stay healthy and find income to pay me debt. I will pray for you...deal ?

 

Good Night

My Wish List

Almost every commerce site on the web now has a wish list of stuff people can sign up for and other people can give it to them as a gift. It's cool. I like how that works.

After posting another really difficult post (still feeling it in pit of my stomach), I've thought of my financial wish list of things I would like to occur:

0) Have my wife find, get and keep a good job.
1) Profusely thank God for her job.
2) Get a big consolidating loan to cover all my debts (maybe not including the ones to my family).
3) Get a good rate on the loan, maybe 10% tops.
4) Get a a 4 to 5 year term.
5) Profusely thank God and whoever gives me such a loan.
6) Go to each credit card company and pay the balance in full. Take a written note requesting them to cancel that card. (except for the cellphone plan card). no deal sweetener will keep me from canceling the cards. If I can't pay for it in cash I probably shouldn't be buying it anyway.
7) Go to the credit card with the cellphone plan and cancel the balance, request they lower my credit limit to $400.
8) Not tell my family that I've payed everything (since I actually haven't !)
9) Work hard and get the $500 to $600 each month to pay the debt consolidating loan.
10) Tell and help others about the dangers of misusing credit cards and refinancing loans.
11) Help people out but don't allow myself to drown financially in the process.
12) Sleep better every night, stay regularly healthy as I've surprisingly been able to do so up to now.

What do you think of my list? do you feel I'm missing something I should include?