Update on Merrill Lynch

This post did not come on Saturday as I promised because I just got around to calling Merrill Lynch today :(. Procrastination. Not a good thing.
The long and short of it is that my balance transfer was only for one year because as the kind lady on the phone told me, they don't have any deals that are for the life of the balance (if anyone knows different let me know).

I signed up for this card right before I went abroad for three months (to learn a language). This was before my debt reduction days and before I decided to take charge of my financial and credit health. I guess I was not paying enough attention. Or maybe I thought I could pay off that credit card in a year. Who knows? The effect now is I still have just over $5k at 9.99% which is not horrible but it's going to be slow to pay down because this card receives the smallest amount per month based on my financial plan. I paid $100 a month which was ok when that card was charging $8 in interest a month and minimum payments were around $60. This statement has $43 in interest charges and my minimum payment is $95. So I'll only be paying $5 more than my minimum which makes me cringe. The moral of the story is pay attention to details when you sign up for a balance transfer. If it has a time limit on the APR and you think you can pay it off, don't go for it. You should know you can pay it off and preferably have a set plan of how instead of an idea.

I can't really shuffle my payments around and pay more on this card and my budget is stretched pretty thin as it is. I think I am going to focus more on trying to get additional income which will just go to this card. I am toying with google adsense and might add it to this blog. Let me know how you guys feel about that. Does it turn you off reading blogs that have ads? I'm not sure if google allows you to customize where your ads go but i'll look into it. I'm also going to spend more time on ehow articles. I've earned about $5 so far on 3 articles. Here's a link to one of my articles on how to learn another language. I would like to earn about $100 a month. Pat from SPI really inspired me and made me determined to increase my side earning in this post. He does a lot. Finally, I'm working on posting regularly. This is a learning process and so far I have learned that I need to improve my productivity and make better use of my free time. As someone said, "Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela and MLK all had the same number of hours in the day."