Signed, Sealed, Delivered
June 13th, 2008. Filed under: Finance & Fitness Fridays.The deed has been done. A big, honkin’ debt has been paid. I had to buy a new central air conditioner last July before we even moved into our money pit. Since I had already laid out the funds to pay half on the home, to put in two new bathroom floors and two low flow toilets and to have the trees hanging all over the roof trimed, and a palm tree leaning out into the street and a bunch of straggly, ugly bushes removed, I really didn’t have the funds readily available for replacing the A/C. But it’s not very pleasant living without it in Florida. Never fear. The offer of credit came to the rescue. When I’m busy crawling up out of debt, why would I be interested in creating more debt, you ask? Well, this was one of those 12 months with no interest deals.
I’ve had all the money tucked away since the beginning of the year. I just wasn’t going to give the interest on it to someone else. It was very interesting to watch the statements come every month – extremely interesting the month the amount owed changed. This A/C cost $4,482.71. Now all of a sudden the amount owed shows $4,480.00. I think it is a sneaky trick to charge me over $900 in interest charges when they discover that after paying off the bill, I still owe $2.71. “Oh, and by the way, Lady. We’ll have to charge you all this interest since you didn’t pay it off before the due date.” My strategy was to pay it off over a month before it was due. That hurt to take that money from my account and zap it over to their account. And I can be sneaky, too. I paid them $4,483. I figured paying a few extra cents just to be safe was a lot better than getting jerked around later. Have any of you had this change in the amount owed happen to you? How did you handle it?