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Jun 3, 2015    |       2 comments

Stupid Auto-Renewals!

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One of the things that has continued to get me are auto-renewal payments or even monthly subscriptions.  As I mentioned previously I really fell off the wagon with record keeping some time ago and am really just getting back into Quicken to track and plan things…and that has been really slow going.  So without that, and the historic data with say dates things are going to renew, I am often surprised when a renewal comes out and I’m not expecting it.

Many times, these are business expenses so not something I address here on the blog, but there have been a couple lately that got me.  First, Sea Cadet’s Christmas present from my dad was a subscription to Loot Crate *affiliate link for my son.  My dad sends me the money, I put it on my card…but it auto-renewed this past week for $55!!  No way.  I emailed their support team and as one time courtesy, they cancelled it and refunded me the money (you are supposed to cancel 3 days prior to renewal, but they don’t send out a warning that it’s going to renew.)

Then the same week…I get a charge for $81.  Ugh!  What is going on here?  And this was for our Invisible Fence at our old house (not an affiliate link but a product I highly recommend if you are like me and love your animals AND your wide open spaces.)  What?!?  I haven’t had time to call them yet.  But really?  This is one that I definitely did not sign up for and the only thing I can think is that they have somehow put us on a subscription for batteries for the collars, which we are no longer using.

So the point of the story is, that 1) I really have to get my act together and get all these auto-renewal dates down and into my records and 2) making those phone calls does help especially if you weren’t planning to renew.

For my monthly subscriptions and expected renewals, I have designated one of my credit cards (the only one I’m keeping after pay off) to take those charges.  This will serve two purposes: 1) keep me from being surprised out of my main cash account which is how things have been up until now and 2) continue to earn points for travel for when we can resume that.

The same card will be used for business and personal, I just want to make things easy for myself and keep it all in one place.  Charges that reoccur are Personal: Netflix, Insurance, milk delivery, pet food delivery, EZPass for toll roads (mostly used when transporting Sea Cadet) and Business: subscriptions for business tools, cloud service for storage, domain name and hosting fees, etc.

How do you handle those pesky renewals and subscription charges?

Jun 2, 2015    |       15 comments

The Hard Wins

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Happy Tuesday Everyone!

I won’t have a weekly debt update this week, since I didn’t pay much off. Instead I want to focus on the challenge my last 3 loans will be to pay off.

On last week’s post, I was asked a number of questions in the comments section by Judi; these got to doing some thinking. The questions pretty much pertained to the following:

  1. Do you think your last 3, but largest debts, will be mentally easier or harder to payoff than all the ones before? And…
  2. How am breaking down these larger loans into smaller wins? And…
  3. How are you planning on keeping your focus during this time?

The first two are relatively easy to answer. I just KNOW that these last few are going to be BY FAR the hardest to payoff. From a financial standpoint, they represent nearly 1/2 of my student loan balance. From a mental standpoint, they are mountains compared to the mole hills I’ve climbing thus far. The only comparable balance would be my car, which had an August ’13 balance of $11,700 BUT I wiped out most of this in one swoop with an old 401K account withdrawal- I don’t have any more large accounts I can withdraw from if I’m feeling that “itch” to just pay another one off.

As far as the 2nd question, ever since I aggressively started paying off my debt, I’ve kept a line of “Next Steps”. For each balance, large or small, my “next step” or target was the next nearest $1,00 increment. So if my balance was $7,575, my target was $7,000 and so on and so forth. This idea was definitely not mine; I got the idea from Joan over at “Man vs. Debt” (Side Note: I really like what Baker accomplished, but they have since seemed to have packed up and moved on over there…). I thought it was one of her best moves, and replicated it in the same fashion into my own debt payoff.

As for the 3rd question, I don’t really know. Since all my loans to this point have been relatively low balances, I’ve only had to go a few months in between the wins of having paid them off- which kept my focus the most. But now it’s going to be months and quite possibly years between wins and the ultimate goal of $0 debt, and I’m not sure what to expect other than difficulty. I’ve maintained my frugal lifestyle since graduating college 6 years ago, but at some point I know I’m going to want to see some tangible rewards for all my hard work up to this point. So it’s like, can I keep this going for another year to 2 years? Just having a savings account worth more than a couple grand would be enough.

Have any of you paid off a large $20k+ debt? If so, how long did it take and how did you maintain focus?

(On a side note: I would like to save more in my 401k, ASAP, while I pay off these last large chucks. I’ve filled out the paperwork to increase my contribution from 4 to 10%, but haven’t handed it in, yet. What do you think?)

I will be posting my May in review, but I’m not sure I can get to it today, but certainly by the end of the week.

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