|
Even though I pre-paid most of my monthly bills, there are some unavoidable ones that arrive in the first week of the month and are due before the end, so I spent my Saturday morning the way I usually do: balancing the old checkbook. I also dug out several credit card offers from the past month since I'm hyperventilating about that debt. I'm an enthusiastic participant in the credit merry-go-round, and credit card companies love me for it. I have a decent credit score (I haven't looked it up since my last rent application, but I know it's high enough that there's no trouble getting car loans or apartments), and I obviously love to load up healthy balances for the companies to suckle at for years and years. For this reason, I'm the number one target of 0% interest offers. These aren't good deals. Or, they are, in the same way that the old Columbia Music Warehouse Club was a good deal when they offered you 12 CDs for a penny, figuring you'd get lazy or stupid and forget to send back the free Hootie & the Blowfish "club choice" CD and be obligated to shell out $24.95 for it the next billing cycle. If you could stay on top of the "no obligation" discs mailed every month, then you could indeed garner a few dozen CDs for your collection at a few dollars apiece. But most people couldn't, and that's what they counted on. It's also what credit card companies hope for. Here are the three offers I'm mulling over anyway, because once you join the club, you have to keep rotating balances through the offers or the musical chairs music stops and you wind up trapped on a high-interest card:
- Discover: 0% for life (asterisk) on transferred balances.
Ah, the asterisk. Purchases are only free until December of 2008, and the 0% for life on everything else only sticks if you make two purchases every month beginning in February '09. They also throw at you the usual Discover pitch about "cash back" on purchases. This is almost an exact mirror of the Columbia Music Warehouse model: here's some free stuff, and all you have to do is buy our expensive stuff later in order to keep it. The rate for purchases starting in 2009 is between 12% and 18%. And let's say you forget to make those purchases (or find you're unable to, because we all know it's a pain to find somewhere that takes Discover) -- the rate on cash advances is 24%, and on balance transfers, a whopping 31%. And of course, there's a "payment protection" plan that you can accidentally enroll in by putting initials where the form helpfully urges you to "initial here," and that costs 89 cents for every $100 of balance. I like to think worst-case scenario with these cards. If they accept $10,000 of my debt, and I'm stupid enough to sign up for payment protection, and forget to make two purchases next February with the card (which is likely, given that it's nine months away and I've already forgotten the terms of the card my current balance is on from three months ago), my March bill would have a finance charge of about $350. - Bank of America Visa: 0% on purchases, transfers, and cash until April '09.
The first thing I look for is annual fees. Most cards don't have them anymore unless they're tied to a rewards program with airline miles or some other imaginary currency. This very straightforward card has no annual fee, and includes purchases in the package so it could theoretically be used as an emergency card in addition to a debt-bearing card. April 2009 is nearly a year away, which is a decent amount of time in case these 0% offers disappear (which they do from time to time ... just like romantic possibilities, the offers tend to come in monsoons interrupted by dry spells). If I miss a payment or simply continue to use the card past next April, the rate is 11%, which is reasonable for this sort of a deal. The catch is a 3% charge for each transfer, so if I move my $10,000 there, I'll immediately be hit with a $300 fee, which is still less than the likely penalty for going with Discover, and at least it's up front with no strings attached. It includes most of the "payment protection" features Discover sells for no monthly charge (although they won't cancel your debt if you croak like Discover will). And the worst-case monthly scenario in May of '09 would be, assuming a paltry $200 down payment every month, about $75 in finance charges. - College Alumni Mastercard: 0% on transfers and cash until July '09.
This one has my college logo on it! And I went to a dinky private school in Colorado, not a UC behemoth, so that's kind of surprising, though I'm sure this bank has gone around and signed up a metric ton of these small colleges for the express purpose of getting dorks like me excited. The pitch is they make a donation to the Alumni Association Student Leader Endowed Scholarship Fund (whatever that is ... I wasn't aware of it when I was on campus) with every purchase, but I don't plan on using this card for purchasing, since the rate is 10% on those from the get-go (and 10% on balance transfers after the grace period). Also no annual fee, and also a 3% initial hit on the balance transfer, though theirs is free to pay off for three months longer than Bank of America's. It's also tied to something called WorldPoints, one of those imaginary currencies I mentioned earlier. Each dollar you purchase with the card (in addition to sending a mysterious micropayment to the mysteriously long-winded scholarship fund) gives you one Fake Dollar. "Use your WorldPoints card for all your purchases, then redeem your points for a world of exciting rewards." Asterisk. I'm not immune to rewards cards by any stretch. The main card I use with the $11,000 on it happens to be a United Mileage Plus card, and that card paid for my airfare to Australia as well as a handful of other little trips. That card has also robbed me blind with annual fees and interest rates for years, but I've put up with it because of the free airline miles and the fact that they apparently watch my online purchases like a hawk for fraud (I've had four separate occasions where they successfully identified a card theft online in the past three years, and deleted about $600 worth or purchases with no questions asked). The pitch sheet is relatively silent about what this card's Fake Dollars do: "rewards that are right for you -- from a rich selection including cash (huh?), merchandise (that narrows it down), gift certificates (are those like cash?), travel on major U.S. airlines with no blackout dates (but don't ask which ones), and discounts on hotel and car rentals (asterisk)." But, since they offer the same online protection as the United card, and they offer the deal that's closest to free, I'm going with this one. (Yes, I'm ashamed to admit the college logo on the card got me, too.) The kicker? The issuing bank is also Bank of America. They just beat their own deal to get my business. *** More fun with groceries. Last week's local food experience was great, and perhaps one of the few extreme things from this month that will stick in my routine for the future. However, buying all my food for the week at once was the disaster I'd anticipated, since I'm just not strict enough with my eating schedule to prepare the ingredients before they go bad in my kitchen. This week, I made some lunch and other staple purchases for $12, then set myself a $10 limit for each dinner (this is a short week because I'm flying to the east coast on Friday). So the same $62 will be stretched out in daily purchases for individual meals. Since that's not complicated enough, I'm going to spend those sawbucks at five different grocery stores. Last night I ate a steak dinner with two friends from Safeway, since I forgot to get food until after all the good stores were closed. We also had green beans. It was fine. I happen to have a turkey roast from the freezer set up for tonight, so that leaves the work week for my four other meals. And by happy coincidence, my bicycle commute from downtown to Seabright takes me past four different grocers: New Leaf, Trader Joe's, Staff of Life, and Shopper's Corner. I'll try to report back on the differences -- I have a feeling $10 worth of dinner food is very different in terms of quantity and quality at each of those places. But the main goal is: no more dead food.
Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites
|
