In which I apply for health insurance.

The reality is that I cannot hold out without insurance. The problem is I have no money. To get on my parents’ plan – it would cost an extra 400 dollars a month.

So I did a little shopping. I did most of my comparisons on ehealthinsurance.com, although i did use other sites as well. In the end, I didn’t go with the bare bones one – I went with the 165 dollar a month one. YEAH, I KNOW.

But I need my teeth cleaned. I haven’t done it in YEARS. I’m afraid I have a million cavities. I don’t. But I’m afraid that I do. I also need my wisdom teeth taken out. I also need perscription coverage because I can’t afford to keep paying 60 bucks a month.

So that’s the deal. I have no idea if I’ll be approved. I hope I will.  The problem is that all my previous info was with the university, so I have no idea how they’re going to check on this crap.  Also – I’m dirt poor. I’m afraid they’ll find that out.

Blah.

I’m so tired of not having money.

In which I win a $199 Apple GC!

I woke up this morning to some rather refreshing news.  Yes my financial world is crashing down on me, yes I have bad shopaholic habit to kick, yes I have 30,000+ dollars of student loans and credit card debit.

But now, I also have a $199 Apple gift card! Yay!

I won a contest held by Akatoo.com. It was supposed to be for an Apple iPhone (but the fine print said a $199 voucher). So naturally, I thought it would be an AT&T voucher. But nope! Excitement! It’s for the apple store!

I love Apple. I’m a PC person myself -mostly because I can’t ever afford anything Apple-related. BUT now that I have a gift card I can FINALLY afford to get an iPod!  I would have just gotten the iPhone, but I don’t have AT&T and really – Sprint has given me such a fabulous deal, that I could never break away from them. 

Anyway. 

I’m getting an iPod! I’m so excited. Last week I had to resist at full strength buying an iPod on Ebay. See, microsoft was offering 30% cashback on Ebay-buy-it-now-paypal-purchases. So I thought, well, I’ll never get a better deal than that.

Fortunately I resisted. And a few days later I get this gift card! I’m so excited… now my problem is how to keep it under $200… hmm…

If you want an Akatoo referral, contact me or put it in the comments.

In which I resist the Ikea 62-hour sale and Suze makes me feel better

This past weekend, Ikea Houston held a fabulous 62 hour sale, with everything at a 10% discount.  And I didn’t go.

This may not seem like an act of extreme resistance -but it was. Believe me. I love Ikea and I love spending money at Ikea – but I kept reminding myself of the ridiculous debt and the sad fact that I’ve lost like a 100 bucks in the stock market already.

I was ready to just sell it all and wipe it out as a loss -but then I watched Suze Orman on CNBC this weekend. She said stocks are meant for people who have ten years or more to invest. Okay. So let’s just wipe out the get-rich-quick mentality and start over. I’ll keep my stocks for ten years… ish. Or maybe I’ll just pull out when I break even…

In which I reconsider the KISS strategy to get out of debt:

So early this morning (1am early!) I realized that I miscalculated my loan. The total number is actually $31,386 and not $20,886 as I had orginally thought.

There I was, just wanting to make sure I got the details right – when I saw the glaring number in my face. 

Yesterday, I got a comment on my post about whether investing was the smart thing. The comment linked to another blogger’s post about the KISS - Keep it Simple System.  That is, before worrying about investing, you should pay down debt because that’s simple thing to do.

At first it bothered me to just let my money sit around and do nothing.  But after seeing that crazy number – I just want it to go away. Go away. Fast.   

It would be nice if I can just put in a 1,000 dollars and just wait for it to turn into 4,000 so I can get rid of the credit card debt and move on to the student loans. But I’m realizing more and more that I’m being absolutely ridiculous. I don’t know what I’m doing. I have NO CLUE as to what I’m doing.

And – I’m also realizing that my shopoholic tendencies are just being translated into trading. I think, well I would have spent 50 bucks at Target so I might as well buy more stock. Or I think, my monthly Starbucks expense can go into ETF investments. 

But according to KISS -that’s wrong. My monthly Starbucks should go towards either the loan or the CC debt. Not more spending. Even if it’s smart spending -it’s still spending.

I need to pay this down before I take out yet more loans this summer before I start graduate school. I’m not dumb, I know it’s not going to be paid off before August. But I need the number to go down. I hope that my credit cards will at least be paid off by then.

I think maybe I should papertrade for a while. There are a number of software platforms that are free, which allow me to trade with paper money. I can practice, figure out what the HELL i’m doing, before going back. In the meantime, I can pay down the cards and do more research on how to turn my money around faster than this KISS strategy calls for….

I’m totally depressed. But whatever. One day, after grad school, I’ll have a super flush paycheck and this will just all be a distant memory….   Because I will NEVER over extend myself again.

Who gives college students credit cards, anyway? What the hell.

In which I realize I miscalculated my loan amount by 11K

OH DEAR LORD IN HEAVEN WHY THE HELL AM I SO STUPID?!?

My total loan amount is actually $31,386!!

How did I miscalculate so badly?!  I guess with all the moving I’ve done lately I must have misplaced the papers or mail or whatever it is that had the actual total … but OH GOD! Where did this other $11,000 come from?

There I was, quitely reading Suze Orman’s The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous & Broke, when I came across the section on the importance of paying off student loans without defaulting.  Orman gives two sources where you can find out the details about your loans, “if you don’t have a clue about your paperwork.”  They are National Student Clearing House Loan Locator  and the National Student Loan Data System.  But the first one doesn’t work. Apparently the NSCH doesn’t do the loan locator thing anymore. So I went with the second one, the NSLD one.

And I looked. And oh dear I almost died.  Since when did it cost that much to go to a public school? I’m going to have to do some major research on what I can do to deal with this…

I cannot buy another thing ever again.

In which I realize I have a bad plan.

Okay. Nobody said I had to get it right the first time.  

Possible mistake 1: Sharebuilder. I think Sharebuilder is frustrating. But I still may stick it out, because I don’t know if the other companies will let me build shares by putting a little money in like 25 or 50 dollars a month towards an ETF or something.

Zecco.com is offering $0 trades. ZERO! The catch is that I have to have a balance of 2,500 in my account with them. But that’s doable… for now. 

Possible mistake 2: Investing before clearing out the credit cards. I know from the wise Suze Orman, that when faced between paying off credit cards and investing in 401k – go with the 401k. But I’m not investing in a 401K. I’m just investing. In something.  Glah.

I don’t know what I’m doing.

A good thing I did: getting my FICO Score. It helped me put reality back into my life. I mean, today I almost charged my Discover card to buy the Weeds Seasons 1-3 Box Set.  Wtf. I already saw each of those episodes. AND they’re all online.   Still. The temptation was real. But I got over it. That stupid score kept flashing in my head. I have to get it up. I have to.

In which I realize ShareBuilder.com’s limitations.

So the appeal of a 4 dollar stock commission was too good to be true. Well, sort of.  I mean, I knew going into it that the 4 dollar trade was only valid on Tuesday. But I didn’t know that it had to be planned in advance.  It’s not “real time” Tuesday trades. It’s trades planned for up until markets open on Tuesday type trades.

I don’t know. I’m confused.

Anyway, I suppose that’s a good thing because I really have no idea what I’m doing.

BUT – JP Morgan went up another 2.93!!! Can you imagine if I had bought a 100 shares? Instead of just one little one? UGH.  I don’t know if it’s the shopoholic in me or if I’m geniunely thinking straight here -but I kinda just want to screw the rest of my checking account and buy more JPM. I mean, congress will pass the FDIC bill on Friday. That gives more faith in banks. That means banks go up.

I think.  Or maybe I should just be thankful that my one risky move isn’t cutting me open. Maybe I shouldn’t be too greedy.

Well. I have about six days to play around the ETF’s and try to figure out what to put my monthly investment in.

I should probably also try to figure out what exactly the benefit of ETF’s are…. ha.

In which I receive a slap in the face.

All the talk about the financial crisis made me look up how much of a crisis I was currently in. I knew it was bad, but I guess I never realized how freaking bad it was. I mean, when you log on to your little credit card account and see that you owe them 3,000 dollars – you think, bad… but not scary-bad, right?

Wrong. I did an assessment of all the money that I owe to various credit cards and student loans. My knees buckled. Here’s a summary of the damage:

• I have $20,886 in college loans and payments begin in November.
• I have a balance of $910.00 on a Master Card, and $3,385 on a Discover Card.
• Now here’s the best part: There is only $1,151.86 in my checking account.   
• This makes my total debt a whopping $24,029.14 – yes, I almost cried.

So I woke up this morning and immediately took action:

1. Opened an Automatic Investment Account. Okay, so this first move I made was probably not the wisest, because the whole point is to pay down my debt, not buy more stuff. But here’s the deal – yesterday the market plummeted almost 800 points! How could it NOT go up? I realize I have no knowledge of the stock market, but after watching it crash, and all the news media going nuts over it, and commentators talking about how small businesses are going to suffer – I figured congress would eventually get their act together. That, coupled with the fact that both presidential canidates want to see some legislation go through, meant that investors would have SOME confidence about the markey… and it would rally. I was right.

But here’s the thing. I have no money, as I mentioned. So I only bought 2 shares. 1 share of the S&P 500 and 1 share of JP Morgan. I bought the S&P one because everyone says it’s a reliable investment overtime. And JP Morgan seemed like a good idea because they bought out WaMu. I don’t really know how that makes sense but it felt right.  So that cost around 180 with commission.

Then, I realized, that with Sharebuilder, I didn’t have to buy a whole share. I can invest as little as 50 dollars and invest in a percentage of a share. For example, the S&P 500 was around 114 this morning. Instead of buying a whole share, it allows you to buy as little as five dollars, or about 28% of 1 share.

Anyway. So The PortfolioBuilder tool suggested I invest in iShares Lehman Aggregate Bond and SPDR Trust, Series 1 – which is actually one of the shares I bought. Sort of amazing that a girl who doesn’t know anything picked the same stock that the ING Direct Sharebuilder tool thing did.  Or maybe not so much amazing as it is scary…

2. Found out my FICO Score  – this is one of those things that I knew would be hard to look at, so I never bothered to figure out what it was. But I decided to just do it. I was right, it was bad. The last time I looked a few years ago it was around 730. Now? My three-report-avg is 613.  *sigh*

The good news about looking at the reports was that I noticed about four or five errors. So maybe once I send out some dispute letters to various reporting companies, my score might go up. I was also able to figure out when I can see the light at the end of tunnel for my FICO score.   Sadly, if I only put down 200 a month towards it, my socre will only be okay around 2010.   TWENTYTEN. That’s pretty rough.  But that’s really I can do for now.

3. Opened up a high-yield Automatic Savings Account. I went with ING Direct (Sharebuilder) here too. Not because they have the highest yield, but because they seemed like the least amount of hassle. With an “Orange Savings Account” I don’t have have to pay the extra five dollars in real trade commissions if I don’t have the money in my MMA. 

Oh -and if you are even slightly thinking of getting a Orange Savings or Checking Account – please email me. I can give you a referral link that will give you 25 dollars if you open an account with 250 dollars.  I get 10 bucks, you get 25. It’s free money. !