August Update (WITH Formatting)

After using blogger for so long I thought I understood it. Turns out it removed all paragraph spacing that I had included. Here it is again as I wanted it. I presume this time it will display properly.:

 

 

I could go into the details but it's pretty much boring. I'm still holding to my day job, and at the same time I have the other job with the company in the US. That pretty much has helped me continue to make payments towards ending my debt. Right now I only hold active credit cards with HSBC and BAC.

 

The card with HSBC is the next in line to be canceled once I finish paying the extrafinancing they provided me. Their interest rate is lower than the one from BAC but they way they calculate monthly payments always confuses me.

 

With BAC I have two cards, one that I feel I should keep because it gives me 7% discount on my daugther's school payments which is a significant amount on top of the 15% discount I get from being alumni and having 2 kids at the school.

 

Even with that, paying for their education is my biggest continuous struggle as I haven't yet managed to balance my monthly income to enable me to pay school from those funds. I pay school from my 13th and 14th month payments and my vacation bonus. On the positive side my daughters are constantly on the honor roll so I feel that all this effort is worth something for them.

 

My oldest one was in a regional math competition recently and after that she was approach by a local university with a 75% scholarship, however they wanted most of the 25% up front and now. They did not have the field my daugther wanted to study so we turned them down for now although we have that door open for later in the future before she finishes high school. I'm researching scholarships for the university that does have her field of interest, and i'm an alumni of it too so it's nice to go to familiar territory.

 

I've managed to pick up a small extra job watching over some 10 computers at a local wine distributor company. It's not much pay but it's $250/month that I didn't have and requires only a few hours each week. I plan to put most of that towards savings or debt. I've also managed to include a long distance relative that is very good with computer hardware and I feel that connecting more with him and with the wine company general manager might open more door for me for other types of business opportunities.

 

Wife still doesn't have a job and is still looking for one, today she told me she will enroll in a 15-week course to train as a university teacher. That should allow her to bid for teaching positions in high-schools and universities. However I don't think it will work for her as she is not the kind of person that could do presentations easily. I just hope she proves me wrong. Either way it doesn't affect my thoughts on how our relationship will end as there are bigger issues around it.

 

I'm also trying to teach my daughters the value of money by having them save for big things they want, like cellphones. They've both reached their goals and have been happy with their purchases. They take good care of their phones and value them as something they bought with their own effort. I also make them participate in the decision process of school supplies and they seem to understand it and provide opinions and compare as we shop around. I was glad to see them telling me of the many things they could reuse from last year and of the things they did needed new but not the fancy stuff.

 

As I struggle each month to reach the next paycheck, I know i'm in a better situation each month because of automatic deposits on savings accounts I have that I can't access easily. However it's very difficult to keep focused on the long term and notice the small improvements.

 

My next big action will come when I can request a loan from the company coop at 12% (of which we get back 5% in dividends in January). That money would go towards paying up either HSBC or the Gas card I have with BAC that is practically useless.

 

There's another area i've dedicated some time. It's been researching and actively supporting a twitter group that provides important information for people in my city. In relation with that i've also research text messaging services and how to educate people thru text messages.

 

It's amazing that almost 90% of Hondurans have a cellphone and how it could be a great platform to deliver content and evaluate learning thru it by a smart use of text messages. All of this research probably won't net me any income and I might even have to throw in a couple of dollars a month to run some things. However it fills a spiritual need of helping others just for the pleasure of helping. Sure it's cool that the twitter account has 8,000 followers and it's a very active account but my main motivation is to help the most people I can with simple things that make their day a little better. I hope you can relate to this and understand this need I have.

 

That's it for now, I hope to report again soon. I appreciate your comments and keep them in mind for longer than you might thinkg.

August Update

I could go into the details but it's pretty much boring. I'm still holding to my day job, and at the same time I have the other job with the company in the US. That pretty much has helped me continue to make payments towards ending my debt. Right now I only hold active credit cards with HSBC and BAC. The card with HSBC is the next in line to be canceled once I finish paying the extrafinancing they provided me. Their interest rate is lower than the one from BAC but they way they calculate monthly payments always confuses me. With BAC I have two cards, one that I feel I should keep because it gives me 7% discount on my daugther's school payments which is a significant amount on top of the 15% discount I get from being alumni and having 2 kids at the school. Even with that, paying for their education is my biggest continuous struggle as I haven't yet managed to balance my monthly income to enable me to pay school from those funds. I pay school from my 13th and 14th month payments and my vacation bonus. On the positive side my daughters are constantly on the honor roll so I feel that all this effort is worth something for them. My oldest one was in a regional math competition recently and after that she was approach by a local university with a 75% scholarship, however they wanted most of the 25% up front and now. They did not have the field my daugther wanted to study so we turned them down for now although we have that door open for later in the future before she finishes high school. I'm researching scholarships for the university that does have her field of interest, and i'm an alumni of it too so it's nice to go to familiar territory. I've managed to pick up a small extra job watching over some 10 computers at a local wine distributor company. It's not much pay but it's $250/month that I didn't have and requires only a few hours each week. I plan to put most of that towards savings or debt. I've also managed to include a long distance relative that is very good with computer hardware and I feel that connecting more with him and with the wine company general manager might open more door for me for other types of business opportunities. Wife still doesn't have a job and is still looking for one, today she told me she will enroll in a 15-week course to train as a university teacher. That should allow her to bid for teaching positions in high-schools and universities. However I don't think it will work for her as she is not the kind of person that could do presentations easily. I just hope she proves me wrong. Either way it doesn't affect my thoughts on how our relationship will end as there are bigger issues around it. I'm also trying to teach my daughters the value of money by having them save for big things they want, like cellphones. They've both reached their goals and have been happy with their purchases. They take good care of their phones and value them as something they bought with their own effort. I also make them participate in the decision process of school supplies and they seem to understand it and provide opinions and compare as we shop around. I was glad to see them telling me of the many things they could reuse from last year and of the things they did needed new but not the fancy stuff. As I struggle each month to reach the next paycheck, I know i'm in a better situation each month because of automatic deposits on savings accounts I have that I can't access easily. However it's very difficult to keep focused on the long term and notice the small improvements. My next big action will come when I can request a loan from the company coop at 12% (of which we get back 5% in dividends in January). That money would go towards paying up either HSBC or the Gas card I have with BAC that is practically useless. There's another area i've dedicated some time. It's been researching and actively supporting a twitter group that provides important information for people in my city. In relation with that i've also research text messaging services and how to educate people thru text messages. It's amazing that almost 90% of Hondurans have a cellphone and how it could be a great platform to deliver content and evaluate learning thru it by a smart use of text messages. All of this research probably won't net me any income and I might even have to throw in a couple of dollars a month to run some things. However it fills a spiritual need of helping others just for the pleasure of helping. Sure it's cool that the twitter account has 8,000 followers and it's a very active account but my main motivation is to help the most people I can with simple things that make their day a little better. I hope you can relate to this and understand this need I have. That's it for now, I hope to report again soon. I appreciate your comments and keep them in mind for longer than you might thinkg.

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.

More on the Moral vrs Legal obligations

Look at this report here:

 

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/what-happens-when-you-walk-away-from-your-home-.html

 

This is the piece that's interesting to me:

 

"....There's a moral component to that decision, of course. ...... But remember that companies default on their obligations when it makes financial sense for them to do so, via the bankruptcy process. Even the Mortgage Bankers Association itself, in a flourish of irony, arranged for a short sale of its Washington headquarters. It's not personal; it's business. So think of strategic default as a business decision, and do a cold-eyed cost-benefit analysis of whether it makes sense for you...."

 

 

I see businesses making these "it's not personal it's business" decisions everyday, why shouldn't I be Iowesomuch Inc and do the same and forego my moral obligations and stay only with my legal obligations?

 

I hope to hear from you about this.

 

 

Interesting story

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/bringing-expired-debt-back-to-life.html

 

Read this part :

 

"Some lenders say borrowers have a moral obligation to pay their debts even if they are no longer legally responsible."

 

I didn't know that debts had a statue of limitations from 3 to 10 years. So after that time they had to stop collecting from you. So the lenders say borrowers have a moral obligation? What if the roles were reversed? Does a lending company have any moral obligations to do something once the statue of limitations has run out? Would they do it?

 

It's interesting that some people feel the need for a credit card rather than a debit card, it must be a cultural thing because I still hate using a credit card to pay for stuff because I know I'm increasing my debt.

 

Also interesting is those rates, 19% for these new cards, and a national average of 13%. Even with the high rate that cards is still lower than the one I recently got to consolidate my debt, which is 22%. Everytime I hear those rates in the US I wonder if people here in Honduras ever get out of debt or just move it from one place to another until they leave the country or disappear into the informal sector of the economy.

 

I hope you are starting 2012 with no debt or at least on your way to debt free life.

 

 

Dodged a bullet or stood out among the crowd?

Today I got an email from the company president of my 2nd job. The one that I work over the internet.

 

He told me that he had fired all of the software development team, including the IT head that was basically inmersed more in development that IT. He said that he was keeping me because he liked my work and how responsive I was. Bless my little cellphone with email delivery!

 

So I started quite scared today. I'm used to my boss being that nice guy that I've known for a while, my friend that got the me recommendation for the job, and the other two guys that I work so close with. Now they are all gone at least from my workplace. I'm "all alone" to hold the IT fort thousands of miles away from where the action is.

 

The president also said that he would get someone local to help me with user support. I wonder if that person will eventually replace me or if it will really be a support person. Only time will tell I suppose. So far they've found it convenient that I provide support over phone, chat and email. I hope the trend continues.

 

I couldn't stop thinking what would happen if I would've been fired as well. This 2nd job has turned out to be a HUGE income to me, most of it pay debt, but also to help with cost of living. I hadn't notice how much my original job is now mostly all for the basics: groceries, fuel, utilities and housing. 

 

I'm really glad I'm in the right track to consolidate/eliminate all my debt, but something like getting kicked out of the job would really set me back a lot.

 

Now I have to see how the work dinamics (and the pay dinamics) will change now that i'm mostly by myself there. Who will authorize my purchases for stuff, how will my hours be clocked? etc. All those things I suppose I will figure out in the days to come but still is something that I'm glad I was told early today so I've had all day to absorb before going to bed tonight.

 

I was going to write about how I was going to have to keep that second BAC card for a few months until the TIGO auto debit thing cleared out, or how I was 6000lps away from completely paying my HSBC card, minimum payment was 400lps I paid 2000lps today. However you can imagine that I'm mentally tired by now.

 

Have a good night and steady income next year!

Free PORTABLE apps

As I am doing some year-end cleaning on computers, either servers, desktops, notebooks and netbooks I would like to remind you about Free applications for your computers. I'm going to narrow it down to 2 tips.

 

#1 The best place for free applications is www.portableapps.com , For starters they have OpenOffice. OpenOffice is like Microsoft office for about 90% of the things you do in MS Office. The 10% that's missing is the interaction of the complex stuff from a MS document to OpenOffice. If you mostly work with your own documents, spreadsheets and presentations I recommend OpenOffice for it's functionality and price: zero!

 

They have other apps for so many things, games, education, security, utilities, internet, music & video, graphics and pictures. It's amazing how much free stuff is there.

 

But the best part of portableapps.com is that all the apps they have can be loaded on a USB drive and carried around with you and used on any windows computer. Or you can just copy them form your USB to a hard drive in your computer, No installation required.

 

Maybe I didn't explained it well last time around. Most MS windows applications require an installer program, usually in a CD or downloadable from the internet. Once you install it, you don't need the installer anymore. Except when you move to another computer, either voluntarily or due to failure of the first one. Then you have to hunt for those darn installer programs again. Mostly likely you won't find them.

 

Another scenario is like this: Your friend likes that word process you are using, you would like for him or her to use it. You can't copy your word processor to his computer. You would have to look for the installer program.

 

In the case of www.portableapps.com you don't to look for installers. Just copy your portable apps over and be done.

 

If you have a small, medium or large computer classroom, portable applications make it so much easier to have everyone set to what they need to do. Just copy the apps over and over. Those that have had to deal with this will understand the relief that comes from apps that are just copied in vrs having to install them.

 

#2 Dropbox. Your computer will some day fail. Accept it now. Hard drives are mechanical things that have a high lifetime but eventually they will fail. Accidents happen, a dropped computer is so common. How about stolen laptops or desktop computers? has it happened to you?

 

In any case, there will be a day when you will not have access to that computer that holds those documents, and pictures that you need so much. What do to?

 

Well, theory says you should back up your documents regularly. Back up where? how regularly? Backing up documents is a pain in the ass. Doing it regularly is even more of a pain.

 

Dropbox is a way to back up your documents and pictures to Dropbox's servers. If you have more than one computer it keeps all the documents syncronized between them so you don't have to wonder where you have that spreadsheet with your expenses, or the christmas pictures. Best of all it's all done automatically whenever you have an internet connection. When you don't have one it waits patiently until you do.

 

You can even view the documents on a tablet, or via web at Dropbox's site. So if you left for a trip without your computer you can still get them!

 

So you had the expenses all done and then you mistakenly delete the spreadsheet, opps! No worries you can recover it at Dropbox's site and get it back quickly. It keeps deleted document for 30 days after you delete them. It even saves several versions of the same document so if you mess your letter to Santa you can recover the previous version and go from there.

 

Even over a slow connection it's a great tool for individuals or teams to keep backups, syncronize documents and share them. Do I seem like a Dropbox convert? That's because I am.

 

Did I mentioned it's free? You get 2GB of free space to save all those important things that no computer support or insurance of any kind can replace.

 

If I have convinced you to install Dropbox, send me an email to iowesomuch at gmail.com (you know it it's really written). Or put a comment below. I'll get you an extra 250mb of free space.

 

Ok enough slacking, gotta get back to work. I hope you had a Merry Christmas, and I wish you a debt free and Happy New Year.