I work part time, and go to college full time. I'm in my junior year. I'm 28 years old. I pay for school by maxing out federal loans and paying the rest out of pocket. I recieve $0 in financial aid outside of federal loans. I do not qualify for private loans. I have no one in my life who could co-sign. I attend a public university in Pennsylvania, and they have the most expensive public universities in the country. My tuition is $18,500 a year. I've been telling myself that if I can make it to graduation, I can use my new career to fix my financial life. I keep finding ways to borrow money and the minimums of those various ways are killing me. I need to fix it now.
The company I work for pays $3,000 a year for tuition(starting next year, was $2500 this year).
My take-home pay varies. I make $15.40 an hour, and my standard hours per week is 24. I can work as many as I like (provided I work someone else's shift or fill in a scheduling hole. Anything more than an extra day or so requires doing double shifts (16 hours) because most of the extra hours are up for grabs on the weekends) but I can only do so much before my grades suffer. I tend to pick up an extra day every week putting me at 32 hours. This gives me an average take home pay of $675 bi-weekly, so $1,350 monthly.
Here's my financial situation:
No emergency fund. No retirement contributions (any more that is). I have a little retirement fund, but not much. My employer has a pension plan that I'm vested in, but it's only around $1,700 at the moment. I have around $1,500 in the 401(k). It was bigger but I wiped out the 401(k) with a withdrawal and a loan. Only reason it's not as $0 is because I wasn't allowed to withdraw more of it.
DEBTS:
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Credit Card #1 $171.98, $25.00 minimum monthly, 23.90% APR
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Credit Card #2 $736.21, $25.00 minimum monthly, 23.90% APR
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Credit Card #3 $649.86, $27.00 minimum monthly, 23.90% APR
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Credit Card #4* $2,003.59, $27.00 minimum monthly, 27.99% APR
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401(k) Loan: $961.35, $20.64 minimum monthly, 5.25% APR. This loan comes out of my paycheck so it's already paid and doesn't deduct from the $1350 salary above (I'd have $1,370 if this loan was gone)
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Salary Advance Loan through Credit Union: This one is a little in-depth and will take explaining. Original amount is $500. Every paycheck, they take $510 out of my account to pay it back (original plus $10 fee). I then re-issue the salary advance online. This places $475 back into my account, and $25 goes into a locked savings account. The idea is that you eventually save up enough to unlock the salary advance savings and then you stop using it. I currently have $125.08 (the account gains interest) of the $500 saved. So the "minimum" monthly payment for this is $70 ($25 + $10 fee twice a month)
*Credit Card #4 also has deferred financing. The original amount was for $2000, and I still need to pay down another $1,773.81 by 04/13/18 to avoid the interest, but I don't think I can pull it off. There's currently $596.45 in deferred interest, and it goes up by $42.66 every month. This card will financially murder me when April hits and the interest is almost double the minimum payment. I think by the time April hits, the total deferred interest will be around $800 and will cause the balance to start drawing around $60 a month in interest.
PRE-NETPAY EXPENSES (or why my paycheck is so low):
- $75 monthly charge for lease to park in garage at work (downtown employer)
- $180 health/vision/dental insurance (sucks being part time)
- the 401(k) loan above
MONTHLY EXPENSES:
- Rent: $200 for my part
- Cable TV/Internet: was $180, but dropped TV and got it down to $60. My half is $30 Comcast has a monopoly and I can not get this any lower.
- Electric/Gas for Apartment: Around $50-$75 for my share depending on the season
- Netflix: $5 for my share
- Groceries: $200 for just me
- Apartment Upkeep (like cleaning supplies, etc): $10-25 depending on what we're out of
- Parking (my apartment charges for parking): $30
- Cell Phone (includes data plan plus installment payments for phone): $90, could maybe get this down to $75 if I can cut my data usage down to under 2GB. Can't really move to a new carrier since I'm locked in on an installment plan for phone.
- Fuel for car (commuter student): $120
- Tuition payment for school: $250
After calculating everything out, that leaves a little under $100 for anything else that comes up, such as school supplies, or medicine, or anything.
CREDIT: According to Credit Karma, I'm at 580 on Trans Union, and 554 on Equifax. FICO score from one of my credit cards show 622. This is different because I had 2 collections on my account. I disputed them, and they were removed from Trans Union, but Equifax will not remove them. Also, one of them is reported twice on Equifax and I still can't get them to remove at least the duplicate. So it looks like 3 collections instead of two. One of these is for $141, the other is for $71.
Credit utilization is around 95%. The simulator says I could expect a 90 point increase if I got the utilization below 10%.
No missed or late payments.
I checked to see if I was pre-qualified for a balance transfer card, but can not find one that would approve me. I looked into a loan through OneMain but the interest was bad (28%) and they want my car title, and I don't want to risk my car because I have a history of being bad with money. Credit union has fantastic interest rates but will not offer me anything with collections on my credit report.
With this semester wrapping to a close, I have a few weeks between now and the end of December that I could work extra hours for to make some extra money. But I need to get a grip on my finances now. Especially because once CC #4 has $800 interest added, it'll be drawing around $60 interest a month with a new giant balance and that will wipe out the rest of my income.
I don't really have anything of value to sell except for my laptop but I'm a computer science major and need it to do class projects. I have a 2008 car that I use to commute to school/work but it's paid off and mine. Going full time at work is not an option because they don't work with school schedules for full time employees and I fear my grades would suffer from working 40 hours every week. I've even been to the financial aid office at school and they just tell me to take fewer classes or apply for private loans. That's the only change I don't want to make: I do not want to delay graduation (Spring, 2019).
I'm lost. I've slowly, and without realizing, destroyed my finances. My instinct tells me the biggest goal right now is finding a way to destroy the balance on Credit Card 4. But beyond that, I'm lost on how to do it and everything else. Short of working some extra time over the next few weeks, I'm not sure how to recover from this before it gets bad.
Rip me a new one, PF.
Submitted November 18, 2017 at 01:24PM by LimitOfNox http://ift.tt/2B1BV3x
