Adventures in Debt

Welcome back to me! Yes dear readers, I’ve returned from my week-long vacation in Vancouver, and I’m feeling refreshed and ready to tackle my financial situation again. Aside from this nasty cold that I seem to have developed while there (I blame the air conditioning and jet lag for that, not the wonderful city of Vancouver), I had a wonderful time.  How is it that I was able to travel 4500 km and back while being frugal? Here’s how:

1. Wait for a great deal on plane tickets.
2. Save up money for that rainy day trip.

I had already spoken to my friends who live there about the possibility of coming for a visit, so that if I was able to find a deal on a plane ticket, I could simply buy it without waiting to hear from them. And in mid-March, there it was: a 50% off deal for a plane ticket to Vancouver. That works out to $179 each way, and with taxes and fees, that came out to $470. That is an incredible deal! Most of the time it costs much more than that to fly within Canada. As usual, domestic flights cost more than international ones, although in this case I was able to find that deal. How did I do that? Well, I subscribe to the e-newsletter for two airlines, Air Canada and WestJet, and every Wednesday they send it out. There are always deals to be had, I’m just not usually looking for them. So I dipped into my Travel savings account and pulled out the $470 that was required.

Next up was spending money for the trip. I had actually already saved about $700 in my travel fund, as that was for my trip to Italy next year. However since I have a whole 12+ months to save up for that, I decided to use the money now for the trip to Vancouver. After taking the money out for the plane ticket, I had two more months to save up some extra cash. By the time my departure time arrived, I had almost $400 saved up for the trip!

So off I went to Vancouver.

Here I am at the Cleveland Dam, on a very spooky, foggy night.

By keeping my eyes open for deals, and saving some money, I was able to go to the other side of the country on vacation, and not have to go further in debt. Now that’s the way to do it.

Whoa, all that work and living of life has sure made me late on my monthly number crunching! Without further ado, here are the even-more-red-than-normal numbers for April:

Total Debt: $27,845.78

Debt Paid off This Month: Not applicable since I went back over my original debt amount, again…

Total savings this month: $200 (not including interest)

Emergency Fund total: $ 2,211 (approximately, and not including interest)

RRSP Savings: $400 this month, up to $800 for the year now.

You’ll note that, yet again, I’ve increased my debt rather than decreasing it, but remember the new car? Yeah, that’s where things went “wrong”.  However, I am actually managing to pay off a more significant portion of my debt because of the balance transfer deals I’ve got right now. The one on the new MasterCard is the most significant one as it’s at 0% until January 2009. So each payment I make there goes towards the principal. Also, I have been making a concerted effort to pay off Visa #1 as the transfer deal I have on that one expires in July. I want to make sure to pay off as much as I possibly can before I have to transfer it back to my line of credit.

One thing I will be exploring this month is speaking to my MasterCard issuer about transferring some of my other debt over to it. Because they gave me a crazy limit, and the balance I transferred over wasn’t anywhere near that limit, I thought I’d see if they’d give me a less-than-5% deal on any other balances I transfer over. That would mean that a good 1/3 would be at 0%, a good 1/3 would be at approximately 3%, and the rest at approximately 8%. So it’s definitely something worth exploring.

How are you all doing with your debt repayment? Are you doing better than me? Heck, everyone else must be doing better than me right now.

So I haven’t been posting as often as I would have liked lately. Hopefully you haven’t been worried.

Between work and life, there just hasn’t been much time to keep y’all up to date. I’ll try to post a little more frequently in the next while, as I do realize that I’ve been neglecting you.

Upcoming are the April Numbers, as well as some general financial shenanigans that have been going on around here chez AinD.com. Stay tuned!