Craig's Debt Reduction Blog

Down again, slow but steady
At the beginning of June, my credit card total stood at $78624.32, down $1024.03, from $79648.35 from the beginning of May.
      As far as finance charges go, I paid $749.43, down $296.90 from the atypically high month before, a drop due almost solely to a targeted effort to reduce my balance on the Chase Toys R Visa, on which Chase had unjustly raised the APR to a usurious 29.74%. That finance charge dropped over 90% from $269 to $24, and if I can cover the new charges on that card, will hopefully be $0 this month. Wish me luck.

Good and bad news on that Chase card
I written about this last month and previously. I'm making progress. Actually a little too much progress. I wrote a check for $2000, decided it was too much, then wrote a check for the finance charge plus $1000 ($1269) which I made by teller payment. And for some reason, I also wrote a check for the minimum which I mailed. I somehow misplaced the check for $2000, and unfortunately I misplaced it in that envelope. Well, the good news is that nothing bounced. The bad news is that I'm essentially broke until my next paycheck. Fortunately, nothings due until then and that I didn't mail Discover Card or the utility bills yet: the checks will get written but they won't get mailed. My balance on that card is now $1000, exactly!, to recap March $11832, April $7832 (and I did pay $3500, not $2500), May: $1000 plus a small amount of finance charges, unless I can swing a little more by teller payment since the Visa statement closes 2 days after my next paycheck.

Update on that dasturdly Chase Visa
I previously wrote about the one card I was focusing on first, my Chase Toys R Us Visa. A one month update:
To recap: March statement $11832 with a minimum $236. I immediately paid $300, paid another $500, and hoped to make another $500 payment. Actually, that last payment was actually for $1000, not $500, on the last day of the statement. True, there were some purchases, but the total went from $11832 to $10375 (I predicted $11000; I was wrong, but in a good way). On the current statement, I've added another $2500 that cleared afterwards, bringing the current total down to $7875.77. Next week, I'll be able to add either $3500 (I hope) or at least $2500, with a goal of getting it under $5000.
     Which is just as well, because the bad news is that while they informed me of their dasturdly plan to raise my APR from 21.49% to 29.49%, it was supposed to happen as of May's statement, but it occurred on this one, leading to a finance charge not of the predicted $195 range, but rather $269 (and this with a $270 minimum payment: Gee, thanks Chase, you credit a generous $1 to the loan principal). I'm protesting, and maybe I'll get the one month repreive, maybe I won't. We'll see...

Focusing on one card
For the near foreseeable future, let me focus on just one credit card, my Chase Toys R Us Visa. When I first got this card, it had an APR of 14.99%. In 2001, it got raised to 19.99%, and I was able to pay the card off by selling stock and transferring part of the balance to Discover Card. The card was paid-off each month, when it was used at all, in 2002 and 2003. In early 2004, during the 11 weeks that I didn't get paid, I started to accumulate a balance, and this rapidly escalated during mid-2003 as I paid for medical bills and summer camp for my two older children with this card.

     The credit limit is $12,200 and my monthly balance since last June has been generally above $11,000. As one of my few open cards (many with more reasonable rates have been closed to new charges), it is still used, and in addition to the monthly charges asked of me, I send additional deposits of $300-500, one time as much as $1000, to cover new purohases and to lower the balance to the extent that my cash flow allowed.

Recently they raised my rate from 19.99% to 21.49%, and when I complained, I got a change of terms notice in my next statement (which would be 2/05) that the rate would go up to 29.24% beginning in 5/04.

In March, the most recent statement, the balance was $11832, and the minimum due was $236. I immediately paid $300, added an extra $500 payment at a Chase teller branch, and hope to add a 2nd $500 before the end of the statement period. My last six months of finance charges have been $190 $190 $227 $190 $195 $223 (every third month is a long cycle) so I expect this month's finance charge will also be around $195. I predict my balance will be about $11,000 - probably less.

Getting this balance down is my most pressing credit-related project. I'll keep you posted.

My letter to HSBC (Isn't it funny how the errors are always in the bank's favor)
To whom it may concern,
      You offered me balance transfer checks of terms of "3.9% until paid off." I took advantage of this for two checks totalling $2200 on January's statement and then a 3rd check for $80 on February's statement. Much to my dismay, you were charging me 14.15% on that balance on January's statement, a mistake you acknowledged on February's statement: both were charged at 3.99%. This month, the latter is still being charged at 3.99%, but the former and larger sum has reverted to the higher rate. Oh, and by the way, you still haven't credited my account for the difference between the rates.
      My understanding of "3.9% until paid off" is that it means "3.9% until paid off," and not "next month only." I would like to think that htis is just a random errer, and not a systemic practice that you hoped I didn't notice, because there's a word for the latter, and I beleive that it is "fraud."
      I hope that you'll correct your mistake expeditiously, and also look into ways to ensure that it never happens again.

Chase, an abusive relationship and good news in February
In the past few months, Chase credit cards has shortened my grace period, raised my APR, and now screwed up the on-line interface, so that it's impossible to determine how much finance charge that I paid in the most recent statement. They talk about the right relationship, but abusive relationship is more like it. Anyway, I normally look forward to the 25th of the month because with my Discover Platinum statement closing on the 24th, all the credit card bills for the months are closed and I normally can summarize the results. Not this month, at least not until I get the Chase paper statement in the mail. (No) Thanks to Chase, I can't tell you if my monthly finance charges finally slipped under $1000, but at least I can report my totals.

As of the respective closings of all my February credit cards, I owed $73381.41, which is down $4349.19 from the month before, and cumulatively down $9693.59 from a month earlier, December 2004.

February summary, some good news
Using the combination of a January windfall, quite a bit of overtime at the end of December (>100 hrs in each of the last two pay periods), two very generous gifts from an anonymous donor, the same one as last year, and some fairly creative scrambling, I wrote a single $5000 check to Discover card, more than halving that particular
card's balance. Since the statement period was shorter, and I saved $60 in finance charges from that card alone, my total finance charges paid was $1142.73, crushingly burdensome, but still -$112.11 from the month before.

My total debt stands at $77730.60, compared with $83075.00 last month, down by a humbling $5344.40. I worked 6 nights in a row this week the last week of January, so with a little luck and quite a bit of meal-skipping, I may be able to bring that Discover Card balance to $0, at which point I can take advantage of their 6.9% offer of transferred balances. Oh, there was more good news regarding that Discover Card: after the $5000 check, I tried once again to get them to change my APR, which they raised two months ago from 17.99% to 21.99% back to the 14.99% that it was back in 2000. I didn't quite succeed, but they agreed at first to lower it back down to 17.99% and keeping the representative on the phone, finally to 15.99%. Couldn't get the 14.99% - yet soon, at least for 4-6 months, it will be 6.9%. For those who have been keeping track over the long haul, my total is down $6573.38 in the 4 months since October 2004.