Dave echos a sentiment I’ve begun to hear more and more often. Apparently, it’s getting more and more OK to walk away from ones mortgage:

This isn’t about having your credit score ruined or not being able to get another mortgage for a few more years. It also isn’t about a moral choice anymore, as I thought it was back in 2008. This is about people who have gotten screwed over by the very banks that we have been paying to keep in existence. The banks get all the help they need while the people get nothing – it’s a messed up system right now.

The logic here is truly mind-bending. Let me see if I can get this straight: Those darn banks got bailed out, which is unfair and shouldn’t have happened. But because we did go and bail them out, we should also bail out those people who borrowed far more than they should have. Which is also unfair, but you know, two wrongs always make a right.

As far as those people walking away from their homes, I have little sympathy for them. Nobody twisted their arm to get them to sign that mortgage contract. They rolled the dice in a game they shouldn’t have been playing. Just because they greatly discounted the odds of snake eyes coming up doesn’t mean they shouldn’t lose when it comes up. At the very least, *I* certainly shouldn’t be losing because they did.

I really have to laugh at the various credit card companies and their reaction to the imminent passage of new credit card legislation that curtails some of their most egregious activities. Threatening that they may just have to start screwing over their most responsible customers in order to make up for no longer being able to screw over their less than perfect ones as badly.

“Those who have managed their credit well and currently have very good credit card deals will find that card companies are limited in their ability to distinguish between them and those that have credit problems,” Edward Yingling, president of the American Bankers Assn., said in a statement.

“The result will be some subsidy from those that manage their credit well to those that have problems, affecting negatively the terms the former will receive.”

Who do they think they’re kidding? Those most responsible customers don’t need their silly pieces of plastic, after all. They are merely a convenience. Attempt to nickel and dime them, and you’ll see a mass exodus to either those credit card issuers who know that a fairly treated customer can be a profitable one, or off the credit merry go round altogether and using their debit cards.

Or, god forbid, back to cash. The Horror…

For the first time since I initially laid down the plastic to pick up some trinket almost 20 years ago, we are officially credit card debt free!

Following my little rant over Chase doing extensive modifications to our agreement, we shuffled a few items around in our budget, waited for my side business commission check to come in, and then scheduled one whopper of a payment to them. The payment cleared last night.

And now, I have an envelope on my desk containing the remains of a credit card along with a letter requesting account closure just waiting for me to find a stamp.

So it looks like we’re in collapse and people are killing each other in the streets. Oh, wait, no, not really.

Sure, the markets are having a fit, which makes it painful to look at our retirement accounts. Except that we aren’t planning on touching them for many years, so eh. Feel a little bad for the baby boomers inching up on retirement, but really, not much. Yes, I know that schadenfreude isn’t exactly a positive emotion or anything, but many of them have defined their lives by excess so they shouldn’t be surprised when it comes around to bite ‘em. A little frugality isn’t perhaps a terrible thing.

photo credit: missdesigndiva

Meanwhile our politicians are tripping over themselves trying to do, well, I don’t really know. Looks like they are hellbent on trying to find a way to spend my son’s future income in an effort to stave off what will be an admittedly painful correction. Personally, being a free market kind of guy, I say go ahead and let it correct. But I am probably missing the big picture.

That said, at least in our household, things are certainly not flying off track. In fact, despite the supposed tightening of the credit market, we just received notice that one of our credit cards has substantially increased it’s limit. Thanks, but we really don’t need it. We won’t mention that to the government, because they may just decide they need that as well!

We did a decent job of killing off more debt this month. Broke well past the $1000 mark. And honestly are still living quite comfortably even with that kind of progress. We could probably introduce a little more pain and get the ball rolling a little faster. But that’s a budgeting issue, not a reporting one.

I’ve been having a lot of fun recently with my side business, and it’s beginning to really take off. Right now it is not adding any to our debt attack plan, as I am stockpiling cash right now in anticipation of further expansion. The holidays are rapidly approaching, and I have a feeling I’ll be spending a fair amount on advertising soon!

Oh, and oops, I will take a cue from Wall Street and restate some debt. I misread a medical bill statement and understated that debt by around $800. Where’s my bailout?

Not exactly breaking any news to those of you following the personal finance blog world, but HSBC has out of the blue decided to lop off a quarter percent on their HSBC Direct savings accounts. Mind you, the email I just received from them didn’t mention that fact, just that their summer high-rate promotion had come to an end (hmmm, I don’t recall a notice that their high-rate promotion had begun), but that the rate is still .2% above the rate they were offering before the promotion.

Oh, and that they were now offering the incredible rate of 3.75% on a CD…

Which just reminded me that I want out of HSBC-land. I only log into the account once or twice a month, either to deposit my monthly non-monthly bills money (ala something like 1/12th of our property taxes or 1/6th of our car insurance payment) or, if when it becomes time to pay one of those irregular bills, to withdraw what was set aside. And each and every time, I’m annoyed by their login process. On two occasions now, I’ve had to waste my time calling them up and plead to let me back into my account after screwing up the login a few times in a row.

If I truly value my time, just one call to restore my account after a login foul up will easily kills a few years in extra interest beyond what I can get elsewhere. It’s just not worth it to trade that five bucks or so a year extra my irregular bill fund earns at HSBC with the simplicity that is ING Direct (where I keep my side business money partitioned away from our ‘regular’ money).

So I just opened another sub account at ING, and in a few days, I can remove one more bank from my Financial Institutions I Have Accounts With list.

On the heels of the recent Federal rate cut, ING Direct acted the early mover and dropped their interest rates on the Orange savings as well as their Electric Orange checking accounts. The other shoe fell with HSBC Direct stripping off a half-percent, plus a bit.

So I’m left oh-so-patiently waiting for the inevitable next step: the lower interest rates reflected on my credit card statements…

I had a laugh at ING Direct’s maintenance message when I tried to check on a transfer late last night:

ING, I’d absolutely love to… think you can do anything about those people who keep adding bits and pieces to our bills?

(If you’d like a referral for an ING Direct account, drop me a line and I’ll hook you up with one. Depositing $250 gets you a $10 bonus. And yes, it gets me a $25 one – we both get to win… )

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…

[tags]Bank of America,BoA, MBNA, cancel account, credit cards, identity theft, mail[/tags]

You know, I really appreciated the simplicity of paying the bank that took over serving our mortgage via their simple online form. No need to write out a check or make a call or, well, anything other than enter any additional principal I’d like to include with this payment, click ‘Pay Bill’, and then ‘Confirm Payment’.

So this morning, I receive my bill and, like the good customer I am, hit U.S. Bank‘s payment center to pay it. And what do I see at the bottom of my ‘Confirm Payment’ screen but a new line item: ‘Fees’. Just ‘Fees’. No explanation of what kind of ‘Fee’ it is; what it’s for; why I’m getting charged them now; nothing but ‘Fees’. Apparently they now want to charge me $2.50 just for the simple pleasure of paying my bill. Which, considering the the little mortgage we’ve got through them, is ridiculous – it ends up amounting to a 1+% premium on our bill. Well f&@k you very much.

They do have an automatic payment option that I can sign up for, no fees attached. But I like having the ability to easily tweak my payment if I’d want to pay an extra few bucks in principal in any given month. Fully automatic payments have always bugged me. I like the extra step, even just to remind myself that money is going out and that the payment is in the amount that I’m expecting.

So I’m stuck either having to pay to pay, via their little convenience fee or with a stamp when I mail in my payment (yes, I know, it’s just 39¢ a payment; it’s the principal of the thing damnit! ). Or I have to sign up for an automatic payment system that I don’t want.

Just one additional tiny but aggravating motivation to pay off everything as soon as I possibly can.

[tags]mortgage,customer service,bank fees,US Bank,annoyances,nickel and dime,death by a thousand cuts[/tags]

I find myself with the need for another checking account. I’ve had no experience with anyone’s checking account besides ours at our local bank – which is just fine for personal stuff, but I’m not a huge fan of their online presence – and the Bank of America account that I had several years back. I could set up another account at the local bank, but thought it might be fun to play around with another account (yeah, I know, I’m apparently a nerd to find something like playing with a bank account fun… ).

Anyway, my needs for this account are pretty simple:

• Minimal opening balance – I won’t be transferring in $1,000 on opening day. I’ve got better uses for that money than keeping a checking account open, no matter how good the account looks. A $1 opening balance would be perfect.
• No monthly fees regardless of balance – this account will never hold a substantial level of money, as it’s just a checking account. If it ever holds a substantial amount, it won’t be for long as there are certainly more appropriate vehicles to earn a little interest on that excess balance.
• Debit Visa/Mastercard linked to account; no need for physical checks – I have no need for the ability to write a physical check. Everyone who needs to receive payments via this account is able to take a credit card. And really, what business other than the smallest can’t anymore?
• A money-market account that meets the above criteria may do the job fine – I don’t foresee doing more than a handful of transactions a month. My cursory look didn’t show any that specifically said they offered a debit Visa/Mastercard attached though…

Anyone have a recommendation?

[tags]checking account,money market,debit,online banking[/tags]