The Dividend Girl Dirty Little Secrets about Debt

Dieting is hard, very hard. I am learning it day by day. I may enroll at a gym at this point, I will see. I had loss 5 lbs so far, but it seem like I cannot loss more. I guess I eat too much for my kind of lifestyle - I spend all day sitting at my desk and once home, I am back in front of my computer. No miracle will happen by its own. I walk around 1 hour per day. I would need to add an extra an hour and a half to that. My plan was to get up 30 minutes earlier to walk 30 minutes more in the morning but hey, in the morning, its hard to get out of bed. I am the luxurious lazy type. Beauty sleep get in front of everything in term of priorities.

One thing that is helping is that I fix myself a weight loss of 10 lbs per month so its not catastrophic not to be able to lose weight for a couple days. Better to be stabilize. I am going to write a more complete post about dieting soon. You,ll see what involve dieting and how much boring it can be.

I don't know for you, but despite being single with no kids, it always like I have laundry to do or something to clean. And it also seem like I have a lot of debt to take care of these days.

My non-registered portfolio complete the session at $117 264.18, which is very good. The amount left on my margin is probably something like 12k. Nice! I really like it when my non-registered was at $118k. Ok so what's the relation between my portfolio and paying off my debt? Maybe not all of it, but partly. Want to know?

Ok, your going to see the ugly true about the debt of the Dividend Girl.

If you had been an active reader of me and real mega fans of me, well for those, you know that for many years now, TD Visa had been offering me different credit card balance transfer promotions. I had been offered over the years several interest rates, like 4.99%, 2.99, 1.99%. And each time, the promotional interest rate offered had been valid for 6 months. But every single months, the promotion just had been there for me. On and on and on. So TD Visa had been very good for me and I even named myself a - watch out, this one is funny - a  "TD Princess". But about 6 months ago, the promotion stop showing in my account!!!

I had a balance of over $11 500 on 2 different offer. One offer had expired recently and one was about to expired by the end of October. But because I had an offered expired on a $7 500, all money paid on the card was "pro rata". In other words, I was paying 22.9% on a $7 500 balance and 1.9% on the rest, $4 000. Its the first time ever I ever had to deal with such things. Before, when I noticed that my promotional rate was about to expired, I simply took the balance, transfer it to my other Visa cards. As soon the transfer completed, I gave TD Visa a call, proceed with the promotional credit card balance transfer at 4.99%or whatever else and voilà, I was good for another 6 months.

But its not working like that anymore because TD Visa stop being good for me. For the past couple months, I no longer have ANY promotional credit card transfer available in my accounts. So that's how the idea of paying off some debt all began. 

This is how I handle my TD Visa misery situation:

I pay off my TD Visa the following way;

I transferred 5k of my credit line at 8.75% (TD) over my TD Visa balance.

I transferred $5 740 of my TD credit line at 9% over my TD Visa balance.

That left me $400 to pay.

I currently had a balance left of $400 on my American Express. I currently have an offer at American Express - a promotional interest rate of 1.99% for 6 months. So I proceed with a $400 from TD to AE. My 400 bucks at 1.99% will expired on April 1st.

I have until September 25th to take advantage of the 1.99% of American Express. What I did is that I transferred the existing balance of my $2 174.71 balance at AE over another Visa card I hold. Once the transferred completed, I will call AE, and proceed with a credit card balance transfer on the same balance. I will get 1.99% for 6 months.

At this time, I can breathe and take care of those 2 debts:

5k of my credit line at 8.75% 

$5 740 of my credit line at 9%

Those 2 credit lines are with TD. Remember that I still have left over 12k worth in margin money with TD Waterhouse? Well, at anytime, after the market are close, I can check the value of my portfolio. If my non-registered portfolio worth 116k+, I can, without any problem, transferred 4k over the $5 740 at 9%. I can easily transfer money from my broker account to any TD credit lines that I own.

The trick is to:

1st - Check the value of the portfolio to ensure that I will avoid any margin call.

2nd - If the value is of 16k+, I can transferred 4k, even 5k over the credit line. The transferred need to be made before midnight.

3rd - In the early morning before going to work, transferred the money back into the margin account. Because with the stock market, we never know. Never take something to grated.

4rd - Repeating the same pattern everyday will help to save $237.50 (4.75% interest on a 5k for a year).

Along the way, I will try to put a maximum cash on my debt repayment.

So that's the plan! How do you find it? Pretty exciting hein?

This is what I was born to do and drive my banker and broker crazy about me.

:)