So I listed a whole bunch of things on eBay last week, and had my first 6 auctions end yesterday. Three sold, three did not. Still, I'm pretty happy. Except that I had "guesstimated" what I thought the shipping would be, and I was way off. I had each auction include $3 for shipping. For the 3 items I received $9 for shipping...that cost me $13.75! Sadly, all of my current auctions have the same amounts.

So, that'll learn me. From now on, before I list an item, I'm going to go ahead and box it up, measure it and weigh it, and then use the "calculate" function on eBay.

It's been a while since I eBay'ed, and shipping has gone up!

Yesterday's post mentioned my "shotgun" approach to transferring my $9000 balance off the BoA card.

(BTW, it's now below $9000. I made a regular payment of $89, and finally got that rebate of $24 from The Weekly Standard, so it's now about $8900)

Well, yesterday everning I get home to find one of my credit cards in the mail. The Chase card. Guess what? $1400 credit limit and a 0% promotion interest for THREE MONTHS!!!! So, I no longer want it. I call to cancel the balance transfer, and am told that once the request is submitted, it's humanly impossible to stop it. So I call BoA to have it stopped on that end. And am told that they can't stop incoming payments, only outgoing payments. Even if I closed my account, the incoming payment would still be posted. They can send it back once it's posted, but by them Chase will have charged me the 3%. I don't mind paying that 3% if the balance was good for 12 months, but not for 3. So now I'll either have to buckle down and get that $900 or so paid off in 3 months, or pay the 3% fee TWICE on the same balance.

I wish that credit card companies would tell you the terms that you qualify for BEFORE you recieve the card. Like in a regular loan. No one signs loan paperwork blind, but you do for a credit card. Once you sign, you're stuck recieving a card at whatever terms they decide.

I'm not a big fan of Chase this morning...

I may have mentioned this before, but my BoA credit card is coming to the end of its 0% interest. In fact, this is the last month for it. So it's time to get that $9000 balance transferred out. One of the conclusions that I've come to (a rather obvious one) is that I don't want to have it all on one card, eating up 90% of that card's limit. It would be better for my credit rating if I had it spread out over several cards, so that each card was only partially full. This does have it's drawbacks, the main one being that I doubt I can pay it all off in a year, and I'll be facing having to transfer the balances off 4 cards next year, instead of one. And that I've applied to the "usual suspects" for this go-round: Chase, HSBC, Citi, etc. Next year I'll have to go to a different tier of cards.

I decided to do it all in one day, on the off chance that all of the credit inquiries made that day just get recorded on my credit report as one. I seem to recall that somewhere.

So, the plan is to have the balance transferred off of m BoA card by the end of the month. Here's hoping...

I cancelled our one and only magazine subscription last week and was notified that we would get $24 back, which is good since it was only $36 to begin with. I was expecting half. Not that I didn't like The Weekly Standard, but it wasn't a priority.

Problem...I paid for it with the BoA card. They seem to be quick to take money out, and slow as Christmas to put it back in. No sign of it yet.

Don't they know I'm trying to pay on their credit card? I opened that BoA checking account, and of course now that's the only account through which I can make payments. So I have to transfer money from my normal checking to my BoA checking, THEN make the payment. Except it takes "up to" 3 days to make the transfer between checking accounts, and by "up to" they mean "at least". So while I'm sitting here waiting on the $89 to make its way from my account to their account, that $89 is sitting on the credit card earning interest for BoA.

(except that it isn't...it's currently on the 0% promotion, but still...it's the principle of the matter...)

So, as planned, we spent less than $110 on food this weekend, so I was able to transfer that amount out of the food envelope and into the debt reduction envelope. We also received our water bill, and it was for $3.61 less than budgeted, so I just send a payment off to Kroger for $113.61.

Today I'm going to put a bunch of stuff up on ebay for sale, as well as some cd's and dvd's on secondspin.

I'm trying to get into the habit of making payments to the credit card each time I have extra money, no matter how small. And why not? Unless they start charging for small payments, there's no reason not to do it.