January's Money Update

Let's look at a couple of snap shots of how my money is doing here at the end of January. If you look down on the left hand side, you will see the badges for the No Credit Needed Network and for Networth IQ.


These are both interesting this month. My debt pay down chart is showing that I have gone backwards! My last chart on Jan. 1, 2008 showed that I had paid off 11.29 % of $26,915. Today it shows that I have paid off 2.86 % of that $26,915! What happened?

If you've been reading along, you know that I was able to get a new consolidation loan at 4% less than I was paying. Using this money I paid off our Visa card and our Costco American Express card.

We aren't big Costco shoppers (we find that we spend too much when we shop there and other stores are much more convenient to us), so we decided to cancel our membership. Both my wife and I agreed that the folks at Costco where very good. We spoke to 3 people about our desire to cancel our membership, each one made a soft retention bid. As soon as we made it clear we were firm in our desire, they were very pleasant and agreeable to cancelling our membership. The only reason we talked to 3 people was because we had to go to a cashier to cash our rebate cheque and when we got back to membership services we ended up speaking to a different person. They even rebated our membership fee that was charged in October. If things change we will be quite happy to go back to Costco and would recommend them.

Canceling the Costco membership automatically canceled the Costco Amex card, but that was a plus because that means we can't run up any debt on it now. We are hanging onto the Visa for travel, travel emergencies and online purchases, and it had the lower credit limit.

Of course we also paid off the old TD Consolidation Loan.

Now for the funny stuff. I think that this might be somewhat heretical to the personal finance community, but I used some of the loan money to set up my $1,000 mini emergency fund and set up a cushion on the chequing account. I just feel more comfortable with the EF set up and ready to go. From here we will just apply ourselves to the debt repayment without the worry about something happening before we got the EF set up.

This of course means that we ended up back tracking on a lot of the last three and a half months of debt payment. We are NOT further in debt than we started though. We owed $26,915 when we started tracking this and we owe $26,144 now.

On the other hand, our networth is looking really good. We ended November 2008 at $19,187. December ended at $18,018. January number is $15,057! That means that we improved our net worth by $ 1,169 in December, and the kicked the crap out of that by improving our net worth by $ 2961 in January!!!

I'm not completely sure how this happened. My RRSP mutual fund lost some but my regular contributions and match from work actually put me up by approximately $150. My Rogers stocks ended up being worth $600 more than I though. Oh, and I found $100 American left over from last summers vacation. This still means we saved $ 2100 in January...well, after the rent cheque today that will be $1,300, but I am very happy with the situation.

I had been thinking about getting a part time job to speed up paying things off, but that is going to be put off for 6 -7 months. My wife is making an amateur movie and it seems that I'm moving from behind the camera gofer to actor, so I won't be able to commit the time to an extra job. Instead I will be trying to make extra money with overtime at work and Ebaying. I really have to get moving on selling stuff on ebay.

Thanks to everyone for following along with my money story. If you like what you read, please list me in you blogroll. Thanks to JW who listed me on his blogroll at NeedToBeDebtFree!

More PCF Loan Stuff and Stray Thoughts

On Tuesday we signed the loan paperwork and yesterday the money was in the account. It's always seems a little daunting to suddenly see an extra $20,000 in your bank. If only we didn't have to worry about paying it back.

I put through payments for the outstanding balances on the Amex and on the Visa cards. There will probably be interest charges still showing up on next months bills.

I'm wondering about the American Express card. It's a Costco membership card we got when we joined Costco. It doesn't have a fee and does pay out something like a 2% or 2.5% cash bonus once a year. I don't think we need more than one credit card though. The Visa rate is 19.99% (can you tell that I missed a couple of payments?), but the Amex rate is 26.9%!

The big thing is that we really don't shop at Costco much. I bought our better computer there last year before Christmas and Mrs. Brian bought her last pair of glasses there this summer. I think that their prices on glasses are really good. and both our vision plans only cover the first $200 for vision care. However, I really don't like shopping for groceries there because it's so hard to get out without paying $200! You save so much that it kills you! So Costco does charge a membership fee, even if the Amex is free.

I think that I will cancel the Amex and the Costco membership when we pay off the outstanding interest on the card. Any thoughts from anyone reading this?

As well as making online payments on the two credit cards, I dropped by the TD bank and deposited a cheque for $17,000 to or TD chequing account. Apparently, it won't clear until the 25th! Ouch! When it does clear we'll pay of the old consolidation loan and throw the rest at the line of credit.

We both put requests through our workplaces to change our direct deposits over to the PCF accounts as well as changing the car insurance P.A.C. over. I have to get the info for each of our life insurance policies to change their P.A.C.'s as well.

While I was at the TD I closed out our Companion Savings account. It's sat empty for more years than I care to remember, always waiting for that saving program we were going to start. Last year I started putting $40 a pay in to save for something (can't remember what now), but we never got too far with it. We'd get $100 or $200 in there and would end up using it to pay bills with.

Finally, back in October I started using it for our Freedom Account. I heard about the concept on one of the person finance blogs I was reading. The concept is promoted by Mary Hunt who wrote Debt Proof Living. Essentially, you divide any annual expenses by 12 and deposit that much each month. We had Car Maintenance, CAA, Driver Licenses, Club Memberships, pre payment for vacation. Rental Insurance at the start and have since added Cat Expenses, Health, Deductables and "the Movie Project". When you need to pay for whatever, you've already saved the money for it. Therefore less stress and worry about paying for those bills you weren't expecting. That's a bit of an oxymoron, but you understand what I mean. There's probably some reoccurring bill I've forgotten, but I set up a miscellaneous category for those!

Anyhow, I cleared out the money and closed the account. When the teller asked why I wanted to close the account I told him; "I'm moving my account to President's Choice". He didn't really seem to care.

Welcome Back

I'd like to welcome everyone back, or welcome you to my blog if you haven't been here before. As this is post number 2, the second option seems to be much more likely.

Last month, I got a Christmas bonus at work of $300 and was quite excited. That combined with a Survivor pool at work that won me $50 meant that in December we were able to pay off the last $335 of the Wells Fargo furniture loan for the couch we bought back in April of 2007. The loan was 0% for the first year and then was going to go up to 28.9% if it wasn't all paid off in time. Of course, all the interest over the whole year would of been due.

My wife and I were really pleased to get that out of the way. Now, we are looking at the rest of our debts and deciding on what to snowball next. We have a consolidation loan with $13,000.00 at 11%, a line of credit at about $8,000.00, an American Express card with approximately $2,000.00 at 25.99%, a Visa card with $900.00 at 19.75%. On top of that we haven't saved up our $1,000.00 Emergency Fund yet.

We wanted to get that Wells Fargo debt gone before the $164.66+ of virtual interest became real interest. Now that it's out of the way, we are ready to tackle the E.F. and the other debts. Because we have a wide range of debts and interest rates we contacted President's Choice Financial to see about consolidating everything. If they agree it means that everything will be at either 8.5 or 8.75 %. That means knocking about three months off of our estimated payment schedule. That means saving $3,600.00 of interest. Holy crap, I'm just floored by that. If they ok us, we will be going in to T.D. Canada Trust to pay off the loan, the line of credit and the visa.

Now, if they want to keep our business they will have to give us a better rate of interest than PCF and I want no fees on our chequing account. I don't expect them to give that to us.

So Monday night I'll let people know if we got the loan.