I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…

Archive for the ‘plan’ Category

Hurry up and wait, hurry up and wait.  Vanguard received my paperwork today in the mail to transfer my assets from Wachovia.  So I am officially a Vanguard client now.  Yay!

But online it says they estimate completion of the asset transfer by November 9th, 2007.  That’s over 3 months from now!  Ugh.  Why does it take so long?  That’s not a question about Vanguard really it is a question about the whole transferring of assets.  That just seems like a really long time.

Hopefully it takes a lot less time than that.  I’m still excited though!  I’m moving forward, a little at a time.  My financial house is resembling a house of cards less and less these days.  Good riddance! 
~J

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Well, we got a letter today requesting more information from the credit card we applied for to transfer our Capital One balance to.  That’s never happened before so I don’t know what to think about it.  We don’t apply for many credit cards though so there is that, and the last one was a long long time ago.  Times change.  Heh.

Two were easy — a copy of my spouse’s latest pay stub and a copy of a utility bill verifying our address.  The third though — they wanted a recent phone bill with our phone number on it.  But we have voice over internet for our phone through Comcast, and their bill doesn’t have our phone number printed on it.  So I wrote a little letter explaining that with a copy of the bill, and we’ll see.

If they don’t approve us, life goes on.  We’ll just pay Capital One more interest while we explore other options.   My other (with no balance) credit card is offering a “2.99% interest for life of the balance” transfer offer right now, I just don’t want to pay the 3% balance transfer fee.

And so it goes.  No one said life was simple.

~J

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Yesterday Trent at The Simple Dollar linked a tool found on the CNN Money site called The Prioritizer. I thought it sounded interesting so I tried it out.

Well, it is more than interesting. It is great! It is a very simple concept — enter in up to 15 goals (it talks about financial goals but really, you could use any type) and then answer a series of questions where you choose the more important between two goals. At the end it will assign a ranking to all your goals.

I learned a lot just doing this on the spur of the moment, and I think when I sit down with my spouse and we come up with a more concrete list and each do it again, we will be surprised. For example, it is more important to me to fund my son’s education than it is to pay off my own student loans according to this program. And I think that is actually true. Paying student loan debt beat retirement savings, which means retirement savings lost to funding my son’s education as well. I think guilt about how little I have done so far played a factor in my rankings.

I don’t know if the prioritizer will actually change what I am doing in any way, but paying off the credit cards was #1 by a landslide so I don’t need to re-evaluate the whole shebang yet.
~J

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The next big step in getting our financial house in order.  The IRAs.

My spouse has a 401K through his work that he contributes to.  Not as much as our goal is, but we want to get out of debt first.  He contributes 4% and our goal is to up that a little bit at a time until at some point after we are not in debt it is at 10%.  We may up it to 5% this year.  We are still discussing it.

I have a Roth IRA which I contributed to while I was in grad school and have not done anything to since.  My spouse has a traditional IRA he rolled his 401K from his last job into.  What I need to do is decide what I want to do with the IRAs.  Mine is in a national bank and I have easy access to dealing with it but I am not happy with the level of fees I am charged, and my spouse’s is in a local bank where we used to live and can only be “moved” without penalty one time a year, like a CD.

I want to move them both to a different place, somewhere I choose thoughtfully.  I want to be a wee bit more involved in what is going on with them and pay a little more attention.  They are both doing fine but I want them to be more under our control and less a kind of “thing” out there that we have but don’t really even notice.

I need to start researching firms and figure out where I can best put them that minimize fees to me and also figure out of there are any tax consequences to moving an IRA from one company to another (I wouldn’t think there is, but, that is why I need to find out.  There might be for all I know).  I need to figure out my options.

And I have no idea even where to start.  I’m sure the information is out there though, and I will find it.  Six months ago I only had a foggy idea about how to start addressing our debt situation, and now, I have a solid workable plan.  I’ll get there.

Hopefully soon. 
~J

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But this time it is a good thing. No, really!

I don’t know why I’ve waited so long to take advantage of a “0% interest on balance transfers” offer. I keep thinking to myself — I need to do this. I have excellent credit, I would most likely be approved (my spouse and I jointly), and I am paying 10.9% interest right now so why am I NOT doing this? I would tell myself to wait a bit because we just bought a house and we have some inquires on our credit reports from when we were shopping for lenders so wait til those fall off and our credit scores recover from those but… in reality that was an excuse to not make any changes. Our credit scores will be okay. They’re great now, one more inquiry is not going to drastically alter them.

I guess it is the fear of new. The fear of the unknown. Truth be told, Capital One is… comfortable, because I know it. I know the rules about how often I can make online payments. I know when I need to pay to have it post before the due date. It is simple, and comfortable, and familiar.

But it is costing me money.

I guess the 37 day billing cycle and the $70+ I paid in interest during it was the final jolt to kick me awake and make me actually ACT on something instead of just pondering it.

I like to ponder. If you can’t tell that already ;).

So, I applied (with my spouse) for another credit card. It gives you a $50 gift card reward the first time you use it, and your first balance transfer within 12 months of being approved for the card has 0% interest for 12 months from the date of the transfer and NO balance transfer fee. That was the kicker for me. I knew I had to do it.

So I talked it over with my spouse and then we applied online this afternoon.

When we’re approved, I’ll buy something I would buy anyway (like groceries probably), pay it online as soon as it posts to the card, and then as soon as my next billing cycle, as long as I am happy with everything, do the balance transfer. And get a $50 gift card for my trouble.

I don’t think we’ll be able to completely pay it off in 12 months…. by my estimate it would take 21 months at our current rate of payment and our balance from right now with no interest. We’re discussing what to do when the rate goes back up. Should we transfer back to Capital One for the lower interest, or leave at the slightly higher 12.9% interest rate on the new card to avoid the transfer fee… well, I’ll be playing with the calculators at Bankrate for a while when it gets closer to that time I bet to figure out what makes sense.

And anyhow, we haven’t even been approved yet. That decision is a ways off. A lot can happen between now and then.
Bye bye Capital One… it’s been fun. For you.

~J

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