Discover Cash Back

I logged in to our Discover account this morning to check our balance. It is only $497, this balance will be paid of entirely in July. While in there I noticed their new cash back promotion for July through September, you can earn a 5% cash back bonus on gas and hotel purchases:



After reading the fine print above I noticed that it is only up to $400 dollars in purchases, so that only comes out to $20 in rewards. If you must buy gas like most of us do, this might be a nice way to get a 5% discount, but only 20 back?!? Oh well, you can always turn that 20 in to 25 by converting it to a gift card. Since we have Discover I will probably put any gas and hotel purchases on there this month. Don’t worry, the balance before August 1st will be $0.00.

HS

Medical Bills

June has not been a good month for debt reduction. My wife had surgery on her back and that had an impact on the bills this month. I’m happy to say everything went very well and she is up and walking and starting to exercise more. She’s also pain free and trying to get off all the medications. I’m very happy she’s getting over her back issues, maybe now we can start thinking about a baby in our family.

She had a one night stay at the hospital and I spent the night with her (most uncomfortable chair I’ve ever slept on). We had to pay money up front, close to $600 dollars and the surgeon also had a $200 fee. I expect to get more bills from the different providers but hopefully the insurance will cover most of the expenses. Since we don’t have a fully funded emergency fund, everything went on the Discover Card. I made a payment this morning for $1000 to cover most of the expenses.

June is also the month of my birthday, this year I turned 29. The wife wanted to get me a Nintendo WII, the only place she could find one was online at Walmart.com, in a bundle package for 498 dollars! Ouch, she also put that on her Discover card so the current balance is $351 dollars. We should be able to pay this remaining balance next month.

All of the expense above had an impact on my regular debt reduction. My goal now is to get rid of the CITI Professional balance, then move on to Best Buy and concentrate on CITI Premier Pass in the fall. I hope by January 2009 all these debts are paid off.

I will post all the balances this week.

HS

American Express

Quick update on my American Express accounts, they are all at $0.00. The Blue account was paid in full thanks to my employer. The Corporate Gold account had all my hotel charges, they also paid for that:

I’m still trying to figure out what I spent $756 during 4 days! Seems like a lot of money for such a short trip. I hate to travel for my company; I get so bored all I think about is eating out and shopping. Luckily they didn’t look over any of the receipts etc. I’m sure my boss would not be too happy to see all the bars, clubs and restaurants I went to. I also had some clothing purchases on there, free clothes, woo hoo!

No more Amex… the cards are back in the vault.

HS

June 2008 Debt Update

Summer is here and the debt still with us. We are making progress but the balances are still lurking around. For the last six months, we focused all our efforts on CITI Premier Pass and ignored the little cards, having three accounts makes me feel like we still have a lot of debt.

The current balance on the CITI Professional Card is:



The current balance on CITI Premier Pass is:


We are having a lot of unexpected expenses and without an emergency fund we are forced to cut our debt payments and pay the mounting bills. My wife had surgery this week so we are expecting a mountain of medical bills. Gas and groceries are not helping the situation, just last night we spent $120 dollars on groceries for two, believe me that won’t last more than a week.

Best Buy balance remains the same. I would like start paying at least 50 a month towards this debt. The big screen TV in the living room sure doesn’t look so good anymore when we still owe over 1600.

Let me know what you think.

HS

Free Money

My friends at PineCone Research sent me two surveys this month. We’ll I had forgotten about the money, so today I checked PayPal and found $10.00 in that account. I love money I forgot I had!



I plan to keep the $10 dollars in the PayPal account, maybe later on send it to E*TRADE for the emergency fund. I hope to get more survey offers from them. At five dollars a survey, it definitely beats working 1 hour for minimum wage. MySurvey.com also sent me a check for $20.00 dollars. I wish they offered PayPal, I can’t believe I actually have to go to the bank and deposit this check. Oh well, $20 is not bad for free money.

What would you do with $30 dollars?

HS

Pop Ups

I apologize if you had a pop up when you visited the site. It was due to my previous sponsor, Widget Bucks. They are very new and trying new things. I hate pop up ads, so I turned them off and replaced them with AdSense.

HS

CITI Premier Pass Credit Line

OK, did anyone tell CITI I’ve been trying to pay them off lately? This morning I logged in to the site to check for a new statement and noticed the credit line went up to $21,000! I could not believe my eyes, why would they allow me to get in that much debt?




$21,000 is a lot of money; interest alone on $21,000 scares me. Just for fun… $21,000 @ 12% APR would equal $210 dollars of interest alone every month. That’s close to $2400 a year, just to carry the balance. Again for fun, I could go to a car dealership and purchase a new car on Master Card. I could purchase a new motorcycle. I could probably buy some land! OK, need to stop dreaming, if I can’t pay cash, I probably can’t afford it and should not be dreaming about it. I still plan to cancel this card when the remaining $6461 dollars are paid off.

What would do you with a $21,000 credit line?

HS