Green Panda Treehouse v2.0

My new host has Green Panda Treehouse up and running now. Please come over and check it out. Please leave comments about your feelings about it.

How to Fix your Credit Card Problems in 5 Steps

 

 Photo Credit: The Consumerist

1. Get your current balance on all your credit cards. If you’ve been tucking away the bills as they come in, you may be in for a huge surprise. Many credit cards charge $39 for late fees and another$39 for being over the limit.

2. Write down the balance the due date, and the interest rate of all the credit cards. Write the highest interest rates first and continue in descending order.

3. Go ahead and call all your credit cards and ask for a lower rate. See if you can get a lower rate, even if it’s only 1%. The goal is to reduce your debt and make your payments go further.

4. Examine if you can switch the balance over to a 0% interest card for a few months. Sometimes you can do a balance transfer. Dump as much as you can into the credit card bill to lower the balance. Watch out, though, for balance transfer fees or any other switching costs. This may actually turn out to be worse than stay at your old card.

5. Pay as much as you can on the highest interest card. Part of the debt snowball method is to pay the most on the highest interest card and pay the minimum on the others. When you pay off the first card, put all the debt payments from it into the second card and pay minimum on the others. Continue until you pay off the cards.

JD from Get Rich Slowly has more articles explaining debt snowballs. His approach is to pay your lowest balance first as a way to build mental momentum towards your goals.Trent from The Simple Dollar has a variation called the scared straight debt snowball. He also compares Suze Orman and David Ramsey’s methods of eliminating debt.If you liked this article, sign up to receive updates automatically through email.

CLEP Exams Save A Lot of Money

 

Credit: Phillip C

College can be an expensive investment. With many students graduating with larger student loan balances, finding ways to reduce the cost is valuable to many people. One option for some students is CLEP exams.

These exams test your knowledge in several subjects ranging from accounting, English, History, and even foreign languages. These nationally recognized exams are overseen by College Boardand administered at local colleges. If you feel comfortable in a subject, you can take the exam, get credit for the classes, and pay only a fraction of the costs of taking the class on campus. A CLEP exam at my university is $80.

To show how much can be saved; I used the tuition prices of my university and compared it to ‘clepping’ 5 elementary courses (3 credits each). The totals don’t include room and board, which would increase savings even more.

CLEP	In-State	Out-State
$400.00	$   3,264.00	$ 8,874.00

Here’s the amount of savings:

CLEP v In-State	$2,864.00
CLEP v Out of State	$8,474.00

I think this is a wonderful option for some people. I’ve taken exams through CLEP and it does save money. The only drawback is that you have to send a transcript of your scores if you decide to transfer schools. If you’re trying to reduce your college expenses, then this might be a viable option.

GPT: New Host ,Same Address

The site is now going to be hosted by Nearly Free Speech.  I’m still waiting on Godaddy.com to let me move my domain name, so it might be a couple of more days. Until then, I’ll update this site. Sorry for any inconvience this disruption may cause.

Banks and Credit Unions Are Not Doing You a Favor By Giving Back Your Money

  

Photo credit: NessieNoodle

I got my statement the other night on my car loan. I got the car loan through a local credit union.  To get this loan, I had to open a savings account with a small amount of money. A couple of months ago I notice I had a negative balance on my savings account. Concerned, I called them and they said it was a mistake and they fixed the account.

It happened again, so I called them today. After being put on hold, the customer service representative told me ‘what they would do for me’. They’ll credit my account and then they’ll protect my account from having it withdrawn from with a stoppage.

Oh, goodie. I’m glad that my money will be returned to me for no fee. What a deal. Then again, I’m sure Bank of America can figure a way to make a fee out of that.