HOLA.
I’ve gotten as far as selecting the photos for my travel journal. There are 100. You can see why I haven’t gotten any further on this project. I have two more weeks until Las Vegas; I am determined. I’m going to try and conjure even fewer words this time, because once I finish all that photo resizing, I am most definitely going to be in no kinda mood for writing on top of it. What if I just caption each photo with Something in Hawaii? That could work. So lately I’ve been working on the finances again, because the charts in Quicken are immensely erotic. Bertine sent me the link to a cheap credit report monitoring site, so I decided to check up. Well, um. They’re a mess. They have at least half the name/address/work history info incorrect. Between the three bureaus, I have about 6 aliases, 20 different addresses, I spent significant time in the military, and there is absolutely no record of the past 5 years of my employment (granted, the previous 2 have been ‘self’, which often doesn’t register as legitimate moneymaking trade). Supposedly, that crap doesn’t figure into any of the credit rating info, but I went ahead and contested it all just to be contrary. The only negative mark on my report is one which I’m going to fight fight fight up and down even though my name was on the loan. According to their dispute process, ‘divorce’ is a legitimate reason to contest, so I’m hoping they don’t get too technical about that. If Chase had removed its head from its ass long enough to notify me of what was going on in my blissful unawareness, it would never have happened at all. The thing that you become very aware of in fixing up your credit report is that if you want it to be really good, you have to be much better at playing the game than the banks want you to be. For example, you can’t not have debt to have good credit. You must carry some debt, both secured and revolving, in order to prove your worth to the exploiters. Then they will deem you worthy to get farther in the hole, and to pay them fees for the honor of owing them money. You should own 2-4 credit cards from major banks. You should use them regularly and pay them off. You should never ever pay the minimum payment, because now it is actually permissible for banks to require such a low minimum that you will be unable to ever pay off your balance; the interest accumulates at a faster rate (although they are currently working on making this illegal). You should keep your available credit as low as possible, especially if your income is lower, because potential-debt-to-income is just as important as debt-to-income. If you’ve been paying attention at all, you’ll know this is nearly impossible… credit card companies continually raise your credit limit as a special reward for letting them own your soul. Try calling one of them and asking them to lower your available credit once; they’ll speak to you as if you had massive brain damage. I know this personally. When I paid off my debt, I decided to stick with 2 credit cards: one for emergencies, and one for using regularly and paying off, just to play their stupid games. Since I hadn’t decided which two of the four to keep, I called the companies to make a deal: lower my outrageously-high interest rate, asshole, or I’m closing my account. You used to be able to bargain on this stuff all the time. Apparently this is no longer so. In both cases, they told me they were unable to do that at the customer’s request. I told them to cancel my account. They would rather lose a customer than the potential to make that tiny bit of extra cash. They don’t mind because there are so many other people willing to play along. It’s amazing how tricky you have to be to even have a hope of beating the system. This shit makes me so long for Fight Club. In related news, I love my credit union, but could they maybe not notify me twice in half a year’s time that my debit card number may have been compromised? Not by them, but still. That makes me a little bit wary. Although maybe I could tell them someone rang up several hundred dollars in charges in Hawaii? Hmmmm. Jenni