Time Management, Demanding an Additional Payment and Canceling Credit Cards

Before I share some articles that caught my eye this week (I’m getting back into the swing of things and bringing these Friday round-ups back ), I just want to mention that there is more info available about the writing position here at the Saving Advice Blog. The big thing to note is the deadline, October 13th.

Now onto the round-up:

First up is JD at Need To Be Debt Free. I think I really feel a connection with JD because he’s in Michigan and he shares exactly what’s on his mind. He’s had a lot of hardships, but gets himself and dusts himself off after hitting those bumps on the debt reduction road. Recently JW was thinking about time management. That’s one of my weak spots, so I found his schedule interesting. I think I’m going to need to do something like that.

Grace at GRACEful Retirement shares a co-worker’s experience with American Express. They called and demanded an additional payment, above and beyond the normal monthly payment. If that additional payment wasn’t paid – the card would be suspended. All I can say is ?????

Him & Her at Make Love Not Debt are taking some steps to clean up and started canceling credit cards. They report that none of them fought to keep them as a customer. I’ve decided that it’s time to simplify our lives and start canceling some of our cards.

Posted by Tricia on October 10, 2008 at 5:52 PM in General Debt | 5 Comments »
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Heather responded:
Posted: October 10th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
I recently was told that canceling your credit cards lowers your credit rating! I was truly shocked. I’d always closed mine after paying them off because I thought I’d be penalized for having too much available credit. Seems like we can’t win! Not sure what the right thing is to do anymore.
Tricia responded:
Posted: October 10th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
Heather – From what I’ve read, it sounds like your credit rating can take a hit when you close cards because your debt ratio will increase. But no one knows for sure the “secret” to your credit rating. You can get an idea of what goes into it, though.

We have kept ours open to keep our debt ratio lower. But when we get our credit card debt to zero – the debt ratio shouldn’t be affected if we close cards (at least I hope so!). I am looking forward to less to track and we will start closing the smallest credit limit cards. One thing we will do is keep the oldest credit card for each of us open. Those will be the ones we keep, because it gives a length to our credit history.

Great idea – I am going to look into it a little bit more and write a post about it
John B. Kendrick responded:
Posted: October 11th, 2008 at 7:13 am
Since you mention time management in your post, I thought I’d mention that I’ve written several posts about my experiences with time and task management on my blog at http://johnkendrick.wordpress.com/how-to-gtd/ that might interest your readers. John
Kell responded:
Posted: October 12th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
Hi, since you mention time management, I think a good step to start out on time management is to keep a time inventory. I find it very helpful to take a time inventory (for about a week), which provides me with an objective measure of where I am spending my time and areas where I can improve my time management.

Kell
Grace responded:
Posted: October 12th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
Every time I see a spectacular rise in new readers, I check to see if you said anything about my posts. And, yep, you did! Thanks for the mention. Not that I want you to get back into debt, but I sure do wish you’d keep posting. (Nothing against Jeffrey, either, but he’s NOT a Tricia!)