Great news here today, we finally paid off my credit card!!!
Now, I don’t want you to go around thinking that I’m a shopaholic or that I can’t control my spending, it’s just that this last year has been a bit of a financial lesson to us. When we moved here, Marty had a full time job, I had no job at all (law school and jobs don’t get along during your first year) and we were in full wedding planning mode, so I broke out the plastic quite often. Most importantly, I used it to pay for our honeymoon because we found a FABULOUS deal and really wanted to go with it.
But then, the economy sank, Marty’s job disappeared, I still had no job, and we had bills to pay. Lots of bills. Marty kept finding bits of work here and there, I don’t know how many jobs that boy has worked in the past year, bless his heart. I got a job at the end of the school year, and I worked this summer, but having a wedding in the summer really took up a lot of time and money.
To make a long story short, we’ve been saving and scrimping for a while now, and since Marty’s working pretty steadily now we felt good about putting all of our pennies into paying off my single credit card. And why did we feel the need to do that? Because the interest rate jumped up to 30%. Seriously. And I’ve had this card for almost 5 years now and never held a balance until now. This is the card that started out at a 7% rate. The card that started out with a $1,000 maximum and then went to a $6,000 maximum. Yep, this is the card that had a 30% interest rate.
So, now that it’s paid off, I’m planning on spending too much of my day tomorrow waiting on the line to talk to somebody to get my rewards points converted to cash and then I’m cancelling that card. I do think that we need a credit card on hand for emergencies since we haven’t built up an emergency fund yet, but I’m sure as hell not using CitiCards again.
Summary: No more debt, which is great, because with an APR of 30% that debt was just going to keep growing.
Do you have any sad-turned-victorious credit card stories that make you sound worse than you are? Tell me I’m not the only one!
You’re not the only one.