Blogging Away Debt

End of January Credit Card and Prosper Loan Balances

January was a wonderful month in terms of finance charges paid. It was less than $100. Thinking back to when I first started this blog back in February of 2006, I shudder at the $400+ dollars I was paying every month towards finance charges.

It has been a lot of work to shuffle debt around, but it has been worth it.

Right now, there are three balances that I do not have to worry about changing interest rates (the interest rate is for the life of the balance): CC #1, CC#2 and my Prosper Loan.

CC #7 is a different story. The 0% rate I have on CC #7 will expire in June of this year. June may seem far away, but I am looking for balance transfer offers now instead of waiting to see if anything is available at the last minute.

My “target” debt at the moment is CC #2 since it is at 6.9%. After that I’m not sure what debt I will target next. If I can get a nice balance transfer offer for CC #7 then the next debt to pay off is my Prosper Loan. If I do not have a balance transfer offer, then CC #7 will likely have an interest rate in the 16%+ range, so I will pay that off and then target the Prosper Loan.

The day that I only have to worry about paying one card off is going to be a happy, happy day 🙂

The Laptop Adapter Didn’t Survive After All

by Tricia

A little over a month ago, an unexpected phone call and my nature to answer that call as quickly as possible resulted in a mutilated laptop adapter plug. I brought out some tools and I thought I fixed it. Instead, I just gave a little more use time for there was hidden damage done.

The little prong that inserts inside the laptop broke off at the tip today. There is no hope of repairing that. I have to bite the bullet and purchase a new adapter. They run around $80 so I was not happy.

Looking around the internet, many places were sold out of the adapter at the moment. Since the laptop holds my Quicken and financial information, that’s not good. Luckily, I was working on reports for posting on here so I know exactly where we stand at the moment. I will be fine without looking at our finances for a few days. After some searching, I did find them in stock at Amazon.com. It was a few dollars more than other places, but I trust shopping there.

When I went to checkout at Amazon, I was offered a free three month trial of Amazon Prime Membership. That meant that I could get overnight shipping for $3.99. Awesome! Shopping at Amazon will actually cost less due to the reduced shipping costs. Now, I have to remember to cancel the membership or I will be charged $79 for it (yikes!).

This spending is not a great way to start February off, but at least the adapter went kaput while my husband has his temp job. If it happened in March we may have had to put the adapter on the credit card and would not have been able to pay it off. That would have been bad. Very bad.