Irregular Payments

Credit Score of 500? Here, Have Some Money…

FHA loans — you know, those loans that, when push comes to shove, we as citizens get to insure — have risen to almost a quarter of all home loans from 3% just a few years ago. Why? Because apparently they don’t care who they loan to: FHA also has tightened lending standards, requiring a 10% [...]

American Express Changes Terms, and I Don’t Care

A letter showed up today letting me know that AMEX has decided it is about time to change terms on my Blue account. Namely, a pretty hefty jump up in my interest rate. Plus a ridiculous rate on cash advances — does anyone actually do them anymore, and if so, how clueless are they? Tack [...]

Refinancing for Greater Than Present Value? Seriously?

photo credit: frankie_3011 When did we develop the memory abilities of a goldfish? Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this type of stupidity what got us into a pretty serious mess in the first place? I’m beginning to think it’s time to start saving in some other currencies, because Americans apparently remain too short-sighted to [...]

Fully Funded Emergency Savings, And More

photo credit: me and the sysop As I mentioned back when we killed off our non-mortgage debt, our next basic step was funding a real emergency savings account. As I’ve seen suggested just about everywhere, somewhere in that mythical 3- to 6- to 12-month worth of emergency cash was the goal. The first thing I [...]

Oh No, Don’t Make Us Screw Our Good Customers

I really have to laugh at the various credit card companies and their reaction to the imminent passage of new credit card legislation that curtails some of their most egregious activities. Threatening that they may just have to start screwing over their most responsible customers in order to make up for no longer being able [...]

State of the Debt, Tax Season Has Eaten My Brain Edition

photo credit: fotograf1v2 Glancing at the calendar, I notice that almost half of the month has disappeared in a pile of other people’s tax documents. The brain is just a little crispy right now… Which is not to say that little has gotten done with our debt destruction progress. Actually, all of a sudden [...]

State of The Debt, A New Beginning

photo credit: danesparza As I mentioned in my last post, we accomplished something that I consider absolutely huge — we no longer have any credit card debt. And I’d like to extend my thanks to Chase for being the pricks they are for motivating us to pull as much out of budget in order to [...]

First Time in Two Decades

For the first time since I initially laid down the plastic to pick up some trinket almost 20 years ago, we are officially credit card debt free! Following my little rant over Chase doing extensive modifications to our agreement, we shuffled a few items around in our budget, waited for my side business commission check to [...]

Chase Can Bite Me

photo credit: jeremyfoo With the success of our recently discovered income source, all of a sudden we have a healthy chunk of extra debt destroying powers. Since we have a variety of potential targets, we sat down recently to decide which target was most deserving of the full wrath we could focus on it, and [...]

State of the Debt: ‘Let The Blood Letting Begin’ Edition

photo credit: Civisi Hope everyone had a joyous Christmas as well as a safe and wonderful New Years! Most of my free time this month was spent doing as much family stuff as can be squeezed into the ridiculously cold weather December decided to throw at us. But since we live in the Midwest, it’s [...]