Holy Minimum Payment Batman!

First off, we are not spendthrifts around here, we don't go on vacations, buy fifty pairs of shoes, designer jeans, jewelry, or ipods, ipads, and the latest whateveritisihavetohaveits. We don't buy much of anything other than the basic necessities, but we have had to use our credit card over the past few years for things that we really couldn't afford and didn't have the money in the bank to pay for. Like car repairs when both cars of our old cars broke down, and some doctor bills that the insurance didn't cover, things that in last years economic climate we just couldn't pay for any other way, so we have a balance of a few thousand dollars on our credit card. That we are slowly trying to pay off before some other big expense comes along that we don't have the money for. It happens.

Anyway, there's that new law that credit card providers have to spell it out to us exactly how long it will take to pay off our balances and what the final cost would be if we went merrily along paying just the minimum that the card requires each month. So, our new statement came and I thought it was just junk mail because the new envelope looks like a junk mail envelope so I went online to look at our statement because I always pay the bill this time of month and where the heck was the bill anyway, and OH MY!

If we make no additional charges and make the minimum payment each month on our balance of 2237.76 it will take us FIFTEEN YEARS to pay it off. FIFTEEN YEARS!!!! And we would end up paying back an estimated total of 4207.00. Two thousand dollars in interest charges alone and FIFTEEN YEARS before it would be paid off. YIKES!

I'm thinking that there are people all over America who have opened their new credit card statements and are absolutely dumbstruck not to mention totally depressed all of a sudden realizing that they have sold their souls to the company store and might as well be an indentured servant because it's going to take them the next FIFTEEN YEARS to pay off that credit card.

Needless to say, we are attempting to send way more than the minimum payment each month and hope to have this card paid off in 2 or 3 years instead of 15, knock on wood and lets hope no other big expenses come up that we don't have any other way to pay for in the meantime.

Oh, and Katie did make her first payment on the 3500 that she owes us for clearing up her dental bill debt with our other credit card. We were kind of sweating it and did call her to make sure she was sending it which kind of made her mad that we didn't trust her but that's just too bad because, no, we really don't trust her to keep sending her payment to us for the next 23 months.