Of course, this is a throwaway AND the first time I've ever posted here. Let's get started.
Spending got out of control. Period. Our savings weren't sufficient to weather a medical emergency and then there was some spending happening in lieu of therapy. All taken care of now, but there's the debt aftermath. I think we have a plan in place.
So far we've refinanced the only car loan we have to save a bit on interest, we've signed up for auto-pay with Navient to get that reduction on interest there, we've switched to a Calyx hotspot/Ting/Netflix to replace cable/mobile/internet, we've sold things on Craigslist, and we've gotten a realistic budget set. The budget has been working and all extra moola in a paycheck is going to debt. Any extra moola from ANYWHERE is going to the debt, actually - two small tax refunds, a bonus, some earnings from doing online surveys last year, etc. I'm working 60+ hours/week and two or three Saturdays/month on top of that. We've increased our income as much as we can AND we've cut expenses everywhere we can. The mortgage is more than manageable on its own, the car loan is for a paltry $1500, the student loans are less than $10k and on track to be paid off early - everything is getting a larger payment than the minimum. The credit card debt is almost $52k, though. Ouch.
This leads to...potential extra moola musings. A couple of years ago, we did some light bank account churning. Last month, my wife got a postcard for a local bank offering $100 and between the 6 accounts she opened, she managed to throw $1125 towards our debt. Very nice. She's a SAHM for medical reasons now and has been a bit depressed over not being able to contribute financially and this seemed to perk her up. Now she's been crunching numbers and finding more bonuses to go after.
There is an untouched CLOC with NFCU that she's eyeing. Her thought is to take $2k and open some accounts with bigger bonuses. Depending on how many she can open (household account or one for each of us) she's found between $1950 and $3100 in bonuses just for this month so far. The CLOC would be paid back as soon as the accounts are opened and she can transfer the money back to NFCU. Her plan is to take half of what she gets in bonuses this month and keep it for further churning and use the rest to pay towards our debt, and then churn as offerings become available. I'm on board, but I worry that excessive account opening might lead to denials in the coming months, meaning that this isn't going to be something she can do month after month. Thoughts?
On top of that, once the CLOC is repaid, our thought is to use that as a personal consolidation loan for some of the credit cards (like an outrageous interest-rate Carecredit that helped our medical bills and a Lowe's card that we used for some emergency house repairs). The consolidation loan would help with the minimum payments and interest rates so I see her math on this.
Has anyone used their NFCU CLOC like this? Thoughts on churning bank bonuses like this?
Submitted April 12, 2017 at 09:05AM by ChurningGonnaSaveMe http://ift.tt/2p7Uld9
