Responsibility and Accountability

This week's credit card activity:

$1,489.38 starting balance
- $31.00 September minimum payment
- $9.40 Half.com earnings

= $1,448.98 current balance (8.8% paid)

I am seeing very little movement on this balance, but it will speed up! I should be able to make a snowball payment at the end of the month and I have a paycheck coming this week.

Last week I mentioned that I would be interested in knowing how much interest we'll be saving by paying this credit card off in the next three months. I found this calculator, which says that we will pay $403 in interest if we only pay minimums. I believe that we should be paying about $60 in interest over the next three months and will thus save $343 by paying the credit card off early.

We actually have more than one credit card.
CC1 - $1,448.98
CC2 - $3,037.29
CC3 - $4,363.78
CC4 - $9,105.16

I refuse to calculate how much interest we’ll be paying with all four cards. It would be too depressing. However, when I found the calculator earlier this week, I couldn’t help but plug in the numbers for CC4. Ouch. I shouldn’t have looked. Our highest balance credit card is also the one with the highest interest.

$9,105.16 balance
$231.00 monthly payment
18.24% interest rate
61 months until pay off, if only paying minimums

You will pay $5,069 in interest plus your balance for a total of $14,174.16.

Depressing. Very, very depressing. That’s why I titled this post “Responsibility and Accountability.” We have to face the music and pay the penalty for making bad financial decisions. I wish the price wasn’t so high, but this is a permanent lesson. Never again will I waste my money like this! All these numbers don’t even include all the payments and interest I’ve made over the past several years. What a waste! We could have done so many positive things with the money, but instead, we’re lining the pockets of the banks. Never again. And the worst part of all of this? Hubby and I have no idea what we charged on the cards!