I got a cash advance

I’m a bad bad man.

A while back I wrote about needing another car. Well 18 months on I actually got one.

This is a good thing, my old car was fast becoming unreliable. It was at the stage I wouldn’t drive it out of the city limits for fear I couldnt afford to have it towed back for repairs. This was limiting my socialising and it had to stop.

So when I heard about a decent car with a good history become available I jumped at it.

The only downside was that I didnt have enough cash on hand to pay for it. So I took the easy option and got a cash advance on one of my recently consolidated credit cards.

Now all I need to do is pay it off, and I have a plan for that.

I have a friend who is going to help me wreck my old one, the deal is we go halves on whatever we get for it. He’s got some experience in this area, and the space to do it. Last time he wrecked a similar model he made a bit over $1000, so I’m hoping for $500, now all I have to do is come up with the other $4,500.

I have about $700 in small change that I’ve collected which will go in the bank this week, which leaves me with a bill for $3,800.

And for that little amount I’m going to try and sell one of my domain names. I posted on a board asking for a valuation a while back recieved an unsolicited offer for $US3,500. So I’m going to try and sell it for atleast that and with a little luck on the exchange rate and hopefully more than one interested buyer I’ll get more than enough to cover the cost of the new car.

So I’m really only planning to use the credit card as very short term finance, hopefully less than 60 days, and then I will have be basically in the same position as where I was, before this little indulgence.

$200 off the credit cards

I just transferred $200 from my business cheque account to gold card one. This has met the minimum payment for the month so I don’t have to worry about that credit card for another month.

I’ve got some more money in my everyday account (the one my pay goes into) that I will transfer across to my credit card shortly, I’ll wait till after the weekend as I’m going away and don’t want to use the credit card if I can avoid it.

Besides the automatic payments I haven’t used the credit card since my last post.

I haven’t done anything on my to do list yet, last week was a lot busier than I expected. Ebay has a free gallery listing offer for three days starting tomorrow so I’ll try and get my few things listed during that period.

I need to renew a domain tonight so that will increase my credit card bills by $15 but it’s business related so it’s deductable.

I’m approaching gold card ones credit limit, so I’m going to have to watch it carefully as there are some business expenses that are charged automatically to the card. My strategy has been to put as much on the business credit cards as possible and only make the minimum payments as the interest is all tax deductable.

Well that’s the plan at the moment.

July Credit Card Status Report

I’ve skipped the June Status report, I had a few things going on (some of them still are) and by the time I was able to sit down and do the status report the month was half over. So Here are the balances as they stand today.

Gold Visa One
Balance $5,114 (last report$ $4,307)


Gold Card Two
Balance $14,492 (last month $13,644)

Standard Visa
Balance $2,742 (last month$2,761)

Grand Totals
Balance (at the end of July) $22,348

okay, now for the scary facts, over the last two months my total outstanding credit card balance has grown $1636. This has shocked me, I expected it to rise but not by that much, I guess a hundred here and a hundred there soon adds up.

Maybe paying the rent on my own has cut into my finances more than I expected.

I have used my credit card once to make a purchase this month and that was for a doctors visit, $45 for less than three minutes of the doctors time, works out to be about $900 an hour. Then again I read somewhere that a standard consultation is only 6 minutes, so they must feel the pinch at $450 an hour.

I’ve got some different ideas on what I’m going to do to reduce my credit card debt, and I’ll share them over the next few days.