If you don’t regularly look over your credit card and online bank statements, you probably are. And it’s incredible how much it was, in my case.This week I decided it was time to get the Macbook Air and a new display, and all the stuff that goes with it (drives, cables). The quote came to about $5000, and the payment on a 2-year $1 buyout was $259/mo. I always lease equipment because I know I will want to get rid of it after two years, and I have been taught never to buy depreciating assets. (That’s why I don’t own a house in Phoenix right now).
But because we’re in a recession/depression/crash or whatever, I have the mentality that I can’t spend any more money. This meant I would have to find $259/mo. somewhere to cut out of my budget.
If you know me, you know this is a sick joke. I don’t budget. I don’t balance my checkbook (I don’t even HAVE a checkbook) and I usually assume, as one of my mentors once told me, that if I want more “stuff” I just have to make more money.
But I think it isn’t going to work this time, so I began looking for places to cut. I go first to my Visa bill, on which Environment California posts a $10.00 recurrent contribution every month. ON the same bill is Privacy Assist, to which I pay $9.99 a month to be protected from something I don’t even remember. And then there’s $11.96 from SixApart, which is still billing me for a free trial that I canceled before its end.
So there’s about $32.00 right there. Then I went to my Amex bill, on which I found Rhapsody, a service I never use, for $12.99 a month. You can’t even cancel it because it’s Real Networks and they only let you cancel by phone during certain hours. But I’m on it.
And then what is AT&T Worldnet Service? That’s $16.95 per month. I can’t even find out what this is or how to cancel it.
You get the picture. There are about a dozen of these things that I either have cancelled or need to cancel. But that’s before I get to the big news: my online banking. It seems I sold a car eight months ago. The payments were being taken directly from my bank account by the dealer’s finance company. When I sold the car, they never stopped debiting the payments: $703.90 a month. Times 8. Over $5600!! It turns out I had inadvertantly saved up for my new MacBook Air over the past eight months.
So we are really not in a nationwide recession; I was in a personal recession. Of my own making.
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