Keeping Up With the "Jones": iPad Debt

My wife and I purchased 2 iPads on credit a few years back. It took us a while to pay them off but finally we did. We were so happy to pay off a Citi Financial store card.

Then the new iPads came out and we wanted them! The old iPads worked just fine but we justified upgrading because the new iPads were lighter and we could get about $300 trade in refund for the old iPads.

Did we save to pay the rest? No, we again charged up the Citi Financial store card with a great "no interest" for 12 months deal. Well to pay it off in 12 months to avoid interest charges we thought we would only have to pay about $75 per month and this would have had little affect on  our budget. After all the extras and warranty plans our payments would have to be about $150 per month and now that is really making things hard for us.

Getting the new toys and keeping up the the Jones has got to be one of the worst factors keeping our budget unbalanced.

Lesson:

Save up for all your toys to avoid the high interest and stress of owing money!

Have a great day!
Ian

Provision for Bad Debt and Recovery

I have never had any of my bad debt written off but when my father passed away from cancer 7 years ago some of his outstanding credit card debt was.

Just makes me think if credit card companies and other businesses have some sort of provision for bad debt. I know our family business counted on every penny we generated we didn’t have a special bad debt expense journal entry in our accounting books. Would a large accounts receivable for bad debt be considered a tax write off for a business?

When I was operating my taxi-cab business I had some bad debt write offs but it was not that much a very low profit to bad debt ratio. Bad debt recovery was on my mind but in the end having a few thousand dollars owning to me was not worth the hassle of trying to get it back but maybe I could have used it as a tax write off. When my taxi-cab business failed when I began to get tired of it I didn’t try to get my bad debt written off. I spent the next 2 years making payments out of pocket to pay off the business loans that I was given.

Maxed Out Credit Cards...Twice!

So in the pursuit of making money online over the last 10 years I have maxed my credit card twice. Online marketing is the land of high pressure time sensitive sales of guaranteed income in just a few hours! How can you not buy into that? I was a sucker for a long time falling for all the tricks but by doing so I learned a lot about online marketing and a lot about humility.

I first time I maxed out my credit card I was single and it wasn't a big deal. I just stop renting as many video games and paid more onto my credit card and even got a personal loan.

The second time I maxed out the credit card I was already with my soon to be wife. We were still in the process of getting into the financial grove of being a couple and the responsibility of that. In addition I had just moved to the city to be with here full time and I was job less! We had almost paid off the credit card and I decide it was time to make money online!

I think it took me only a few days to max out the card and I didn't make one sale! The last straw that made me realize what I had done was Google charging me $400 in ads in the span of 2 hours. My ad was show and clicked like 10,000 times but I made no sales.

I was devastated and the pain of telling my love of my life I had messed up royally still hurts to this day. I cried for a long time and she just held me. In the end Google retracted this payment because they have a guarantee that when mistakes like this happen they cover the cost. I guess their system makes errors like this now and again.

And I married this understanding woman, we made it through the hard times, and I try every day not to make the same mistakes.