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Hello-

I just finished sending in a payment for the remainder of my Discover credit card balance to get it paid off.  Yippee!

Here’s the scheduled payment:

The posting date is December 25th, so I guess it’s a Christmas present to myself.

In Feb of this year, the balance was almost $6,000.

I just finished making my payments for the year for all my other credit cards trying to get my balance under $50,000 for the year and let’s tally the numbers:

Discover Card: $0!!!!!!!

USAA: $10,247

ATT Universal Crappy Card: $10, 342

Chase: $14,109

Bank Of America: $16,089

Total outstanding credit card debt end of December 2008: $50,787 :o(

Guess I didn’t make as many payments as I thought I did.

At least I got one credit card totally paid off.

If you haven’t already heard, there were some new regulations passed down to the banks and credit card companies that are supposed to make it easier on us consumers.  The biggest one I like is the no more universal default clause.  I hated this one.  If you make a late payment on one card, all your other cards could penalize you.  How fair is that?

The other one that I liked was the applying your credit card payments to the highest interest balance first.  I have several low balance transfer offers for the life of the balance transfer on some of my cards and they charge 3 or 4% interest and other balances on that same card for 18% interest and the payments I make go to the lowest interest rate offer so I pay much more in interest while I have that outstanding balance.

I just want to get these cards paid off so I can stop flushing money down the drain to these greedy credit card companies in interest charges.

Total credit card debt started with: $62124 Feb 2008

Total credit card debt now (December 2008): $50,787.

Total credit card debt paid off this year: $11,337.

Looking forward to getting over $25,000 of credit card debt paid off in 2009.

Wishing you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

-Adam

The Credit Blogger

Hello-

It’s almost time for Thanksgiving and I got a big thank you from my AT&T Universal Card - “Your interest rates are going up!  Thanks for being a great customer.  We don’t earn enough money off of you charging 18% interest so we want to charge you 24.99%!”  We sure do appreciate your business.

FUCK YOU AT&T Universal Card!

I just got a letter from them saying they wanted to change my terms and interest rates.  First they cut my credit limit now this.  I never miss a payment.  I always pay on time to all my credit cards.  My total credit card debt is going down which means I am a less risky customer but yet they feel the need to charge me more money.  WTF?!?!?

This is how you reward your customers?

I have the right to opt out and not accept these crap terms and then I’ll be able to pay off the balance at the current terms which isn’t the greatest deal - I have an outstanding balance of $10,582 and change, $7,103 is at a rate of 18.26% which comes out to about $110 in interest charges each month and $3,527 is at a rate of 4.99% which comes out to about $15 in interest charges each month.

My minimum payment is $230 and $125 of that goes to interest each month and you want to charge me more interest?  I say it again:

FUCK YOU AT&T Universal Card!

And the card is run by Citibank so I guess that explains a lot.  Since they are failing and cannot do anything right they want to take their customers down with them.  It’s no wonder their stock has lost billions of dollars over the past few months.

On the brighter side, I just made a $356 payment on my Discover Card and my balance will now be down to almost $500!!!!  Only a couple more payments and it will all be paid off for good!

It’s funny, one credit card is trying to raise my rates - stupid AT&T Universal Card - and now Discover is sending me low interest balance transfer offers.  Maybe I’ll just transfer the balance to Discover and avoid paying AT&T any more money than I have to since this is how they reward their on time paying customers.

How risky can I be if I’m trying to solve my credit card debt problem by writing a blog about it and writing all about my financial problems for all to see?

Enough of that today.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.  Except you AT&T Universal Card!

-Adam

The Credit Blogger