{"id":775,"date":"2011-12-16T10:32:53","date_gmt":"2011-12-16T17:32:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mikekirk.org\/?p=775"},"modified":"2011-12-17T15:57:22","modified_gmt":"2011-12-17T22:57:22","slug":"i-am-so-smart-s-m-r-t","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mikekirk.org\/wordpress\/i-am-so-smart-s-m-r-t\/","title":{"rendered":"I am So Smart! S-M-R-T!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Doh!<\/a><\/p>\n

Have you ever done something dumb with credit cards before?<\/p>\n

I have a cash-back card, and I’m good about keeping it paid down, so I felt pretty happy when the card company would mail me rebate cheques a couple of times a year. I have a handle on consumer credit, go me! On average I was “up” about $200\/year.<\/p>\n

So, last February when they offered me a 0% loan (with a 1% “service fee” up front) it was almost a no-brainer. I wasn’t going to be making any risky investments if I had to repay in a year… but if I can borrow at 1% and get between 2-2.5% in a regular savings account, why not? After giving Revenue Canada their slice of the action, I should still make about $100. Sign me up!<\/p>\n

All I had to do was make sure to keep my card balance paid down to the amount of the loan (since I didn’t want to be paying off my 1% cash early). How hard could that be? (cue dramatic music)<\/p>\n

December rolls around and I started to think about moving some money between accounts, to pay off the loan by the end of January. So I took a closer look at my December statement to see where I was… huh?… what do you mean I paid $100 in interest? And $40 in November? And $60 in October? But I pay all my bills on time! It turns out I was too good at paying them off. Occasionally I checked my balance often enough it didn’t show my previous payment yet… so I sometimes repaid twice, and slowly nibbled away some 1% cash each time.<\/p>\n

Because I was only looking at the total on my statements, and not checking the “interest paid this month” line… I didn’t realize what was going on. For the first few months of my loan I paid $0 interest… then I started to pay too much … and over the last couple months I had essentially been floating a $3500 balance on my card (1% money that I accidentally paid back, which I was now paying full interest on). Doh!<\/p>\n

End result: my brilliant scheme to make $100 has now made me nothing.. in fact I’m $200 in the hole after interest charges. So much for the “cash back” card \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

I wasn’t smart enough to keep a steady non-zero card balance for a year, and it cost me. I’m paying the whole thing off _today_. Bah!<\/p>\n

(Oh, and Happy Holidays!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Doh! Have you ever done something dumb with credit cards before? I have a cash-back card, and I’m good about keeping it paid down, so I felt pretty happy when the card company would mail me rebate cheques a couple Continue reading I am So Smart! S-M-R-T!<\/span>→<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/ptY4v-cv","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mikekirk.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mikekirk.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mikekirk.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikekirk.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikekirk.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=775"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikekirk.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":780,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikekirk.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775\/revisions\/780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mikekirk.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikekirk.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikekirk.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}