visa empowerment...or should I say, money empowerment...

{image taken from here} 

So lately I've been feeling financially overwhelmed.  No matter how hard I work, or how frugal I live (well, as frugal as one can live when you live on your own and don't share rent or expenses), I always seem to be *just* scraping by.  And I'm lucky!  My mother's always more than happy to help out when I need it (which always makes me feel so guilty), and my parents pay for my Christmas plane tickets (it's a Christmas/birthday gift combined, because we all know I'd never be able to afford to fly to Switzerland once a year on my own).  So really, I am very, very lucky.  But still, I've been working since I was 13, I'm used to being self sufficient and financially aware, yet on a substitute teacher's salary (subbing until the job market is better, people retire, and they give me my own classroom) things are always a struggle.

With this feeling of despair, I bought myself (yes, I recognize the irony here) the book Smart Cookies' Guide to Making More Dough and Getting Out of Debt.  And let me tell you, it's one of the best purchases I've made in a long time.  That, and the tub of ice cream I bought the other week when I was just really craving some "half baked" Ben and Jerry's.

Anyway.  I'm just feeling so empowered right now, I had to blog about it.

Smart Cookies has a whole chapter on, well, just about every financial subject.  But specifically one on credit cards and the difference between "good debt" (ie: student loans, something that helps you advance in some way) and "bad debt" (ie: credit cards).  I know that I've been paying 19.99% Annual Interest Rate, with a $35 annual fee.  But I never questioned it before, and without this book, I wouldn't have!  Turns out there's a "low rates" option to my card.  The difference:  My card = 19.99%, $35 annual fee, and for every dollar spent on it I earn rewards points that I can redeem.  The Low Rates card = 11.99% annual interest rate, $20 annual fee, and no rewards points.  Rewards points are nice, but really, do I need them?  I inquired into the rewards points; they haven't been redeemed in 3.5 years.  Well.  Over three years of Visa spending (and we know it's been a lot of spending) and the points have only earned me $175.  So really, I'm losing money to interest, in order to get rewards points, but the points take so much to add up to anything that they're not really gaining me anything.

So what I've done is I've switched my credit card to the low interest rate card.  Who needs reward points when it takes so much to earn any "real" kind of money, and you end out losing in the interest rate anyway??  My new card will be in the mail within 10 business days.  

THEN, I spent my accumulated $175 worth of reward points.  My DVD player broke recently.  So I'm without the ability to watch movies on my TV, which isn't a big problem but can sometimes be annoying.  So with my rewards points I've got myself  $100 gift card for future shop (I checked online and there are DVD players there for under that ammount).  Then I thought, ok, what else would be nice?  Sears?  no.  The Bay?  no.  Starbucks?  YES.  Going out for "tea" or "coffee" with friends always ends up being at Starbucks.  And I always get the under $2 tea, even though I long for a latte.  So if it's my most often "cheap" get-together activity with friends, why not get a $75 gift card for it?  At the most expensive drinks, close to $5 each (summer's coming up, so no cheap $1.75 tea, we're now into frozen drinks baby!), that'd still give me 15 Starbucks visits!  If I bought the expensive fraps!  That should last me through the summer, I'm thinking.....I wish I'd copped on to this earlier.  I also wish I hadn't had to endure a condescending talk from the bank guy on the phone about the pitfalls of carrying forward a balance on my visa.  Does he think I don't know this?  If I could pay it off in full, I would.  That's what I'm working on right now, dufus.  

Anyway.  So I'm thinking, I'm still working on the whole "bringing sexy back" thing (although I've lagged behind in that recently), I'm now also "bringing financial sexy back".

PS - I'm now rockin' a big size 10, instead of a big size 12 (American sizes).