Irregular Payments

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It’s been many, many months since our MBNA account (now Bank of America) has carried any balance or, for that matter, had a single transaction posted to it. In fact, the last time we received a statement from them was June 2005, the month we finally zeroed out that account. The last bit of mail I can recall receiving from them was when BoA took over MBNA and mailed out our new still-unactivated cards (along with the chunk of legalese that comes with any credit card). I check the balance online every few weeks just to ensure nothing is showing up, but outside that, we do absolutely nothing with the account.

The account has remained open not only because it is one of our older cards, but because the ridiculous level of available credit ($22,100) brings our total credit utilization score down quite a bit. In other words, it’s purely a credit score boosting play. But it’s time to say goodbye, and good riddance, to Bank of America/MBNA.

As I might have mentioned here a few dozen times, we not-altogether-recently bought a new abode, did an extensive bit of renovating, and only recently are making it our home. Since we weren’t living there, we, of course, took no steps to have any of our mail forwarded to our new address until very recently. As a matter of fact, we still don’t have any mail sent to our physical address. Instead, everything is shuttled to a PO box simply because I don’t trust an unlocked box in the middle of the countryside accepting anything that may aid your friendly neighborhood identity thief. Well, that, and the fact that our mailbox looks as if someone may have ran over the thing a few times!

But looking into the mailbox a few days ago on a whim, what do I find but a several pieces of mail from Bank of America with postmarks of August through the present, each being their standard packet of crappy-terms-and-all balance transfer checks. Yes, I know, I should have been looking in that mailbox on occasion. But not only did BoA put into effect an unrequested change of address, they’ve been sending blank checks to that address. I find it almost equally troublesome that personal information - by which I mean our new address - flows so freely to uninvolved parties.

So, curious as to how they went about changing the address without our intervention, I inquired. And received this in reply:

Thank you for your inquiry dated 1/22/07 regarding the address change. We will be happy to assist you.

Bank of America recognizes the importance of providing quality service and we are disappointed to learn of the difficulties that you have encountered. We appreciate you bringing your concerns to our attention. Please accept our sincere apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

We are confident that your future dealings with Bank of America will better reflect our commitment to your satisfaction.

Thank you for your business with Bank of America. Please feel free to use www.BankofAmerica.com for general account information, and for information regarding products and services that you may need in the future.

In other words, no comment.

Well, then, how about the number I need to call to immediately cancel our account?

It’s 1.800.732.9194, if you’re curious…

Tagged:
 » Bank of America, BoA, MBNA, cancel account, credit cards, identity theft, mail

Just thought I’d throw out a suggestion to catch 20/20 tonite. It looks like they’ll be having a special on debt called Flat Broke: Begging And Borrowing In America.

I have a bit of fascination with this sort of programming. Frontline’s Secret History of the Credit Card is an excellent example of what I hope to see. I suppose it’s a little financial train wreck rubber necking, which is particularly incongruous when I’m probably somewhere (hopefully not too deep) in that pileup. But I’m also of the mind that we are exposed to far too little financial common sense and to far too many potential financial dangers, and anything that gets us to think about how we spend is a good thing.

Tagged:
 » debt, 20/20, credit

One of our budget items that always seems out of whack compared to what I see the frugalistas out there in the personal finance blog realm is our food budget. I’ve seen a claims of grocery expense for a family of three in the less-than-$150 range. Three meals a day for three people (even if one of them is really 1/4 of the other two… :)) for around $5 a day just doesn’t seem feasible to me. Irregardless, that amount is substantially less than what ours ends up being.

Part of the difference is likely because we don’t get as granular as some with our budget categories. I’ll lump in our cleaning supplies and toilet paper and diapers and etc. into the Groceries category rather than breaking them out into, say, Household or Cleaning Supplies or Childcare or Whatever. I used to break it down much more for awhile, but it was just too much effort for too little return. The information just wasn’t actionable enough - I wasn’t going to be washing less if I realized I was spending more on soap this month than I did last month, or stretching out the time between the son’s diaper changes to save a few bucks on the Childcare category.

But even when those line items were tracked in different categories, we were still spending quite a bit more than $5 (or, for that matter, $10) a day on groceries. We’re doing slightly better now than we did back then because we’ve gotten into preplanning our meals (makes shopping a ton more efficient), but I’d still be surprised if we spent much less than $300 a month solely on what we eat. But why so much? I think MyMoneyBlog may have just given me my answer.

WiseGeek recently put up an interesting post showing what 200 calories worth of a vast array of food look like. And MyMoneyBlog went a step further and put up a great followup post on the cost of those different 200 calories. And what conclusion can I reach from the info?

Healthy foods cost more to get the same calorie benefit. Specifically, fresh fruits and vegetables are very expensive, especially compared to cheap carbs and processed foods (on a $/calorie basis anyway). The wife and I realized 5 or 6 years ago that we were, well, flat out getting fat. A few scary vacation pictures convinced us that maybe, just maybe, a little more attention to our health was necessary. And we’ve slowly but surely jacked up our amount of exercise (myself from a level of zero) along with eating much healthier. These days, it’s really a rarity that we eat a meal that has all that much processed food or huge amounts of carbs in it at all anymore, and there are always fresh fruit and veggies around. And we’ve each dropped a bunch of weight and feel infinitely better.

So, is it time to cut back until we get into better financial shape? Nah, not necessarily. We may pay a little more attention to what’s on sale, continue to improve our meal planning, maybe even sign up with a local CSA if we can find one nearby to save on that veggie bill. But the overall improvement in our life that being conscious of our physical health provides is much more important to us. And if that slows us down from getting out of debt by a little while, so be it…

Tagged:
 » groceries, budget, healthy eating, CSA, community supported agriculture, meal planning, diet, 200 calories