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Saturday, February 5, 2011

Three scary numbers

I spent last weekend going over my finances from the previous year in preparation of tax season, and I found three numbers that shook me to the core.  Here they are:

26.10
2500.00
7x

The first number is the amount of interest I earned on my savings account in the past year.  The second number is the amount of credit card interest I paid over the course of the year.  The third number indicates my savings to debt ratio.  That's right, folks.  For every $1000 I owe to my credit card, I have $7,000 in the bank, yet I paid 100 times more in interest than I earned from having money in savings.  Does anyone else find this completely outrageous?

Now before you pass judgement wondering what kind of feeble-minded individual carries a balance when they have a savings account that exceeds the card balance, let me explain.  I travel a lot for work.  I incur the charges on my card, then get reimbursed.  This means at any given time I have a balance, but it is paid off fully as soon as a reimbursement comes in (every two weeks if I do my expense reports regularly).  The problem is overlapping trips, and, I just learned thanks to those jaw-dropping numbers, my interest rate had erroneously been set outrageously high!  So shame on me for not catching it, and double shame for not finding a way to stop the oozing money.  I think I am a little ill...

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