February Progress! "It's not you, it's me"

Loan Update:

Hooray for Tax Season!  Like I said earlier we got $3265 of our money back from our loan to the government.  Combining that with our refund from the refinance ($789) and the house payment we're skipping because of the refiance ($765), and our normal monthly contribution of about $2500 we had about $7319.

SO!  We paid off the ECSI loan which was $5140.82.  Yay!

We also paid the AMEX ($863) which had the Cruise Deposit, the Home Inspection, and Kristi's flight to LA.  We use the AMEX for these purchases for the protection the credit card offers, and we never carry a balance since we pay it off at the end of the month.

Additionally, we had about $370 left over in January that we carried over into February to pay loans with.  Also, Kristi found out that she will be teaching summer school this year, so she'll have another paycheck in July that we will use to cover expenses in August and September (the two months she doesn't get paid for the year).  This means the money we've been saving for those months we can use to pay off a loan this month.  So, with some luck and thrifty spending we'll be able to pay off the Gate 3 Loan.  I'll post when/if we do it this month or decide to play it safe and do it in March.

"It's not you, it's me!"

This week we went to Bank of America and to Umpqua and closed a bunch of accounts and consolidated others.  We opened an Umpqua account because it gave us a discount on the closing costs and we thought it would be easier to pay the mortgage with an Umpqua account.  While we were thrilled with the service we received, Umpqua is severely lacking in their online services and it's a pain in the ass to use your phone to access your account (only 1 phone can be linked to an account).  For the way we do our banking it simply wasn't going to work for us.  We cancelled our Umpqua accounts and got rid of a bunch of extraneous BoA accounts.  We know only have 1 joint checking account and 2 savings accounts. 

However, the real story came when we cancelled our Visas with BoA.  We never used them (only use the AMEX), so we decided to finally cancel them.  The banker called the Visa people to cancel my card.  She chatted with the rep and closed my account, no questions asked, except "Why?" and our answer. "we don't use credit cards anymore."  No problem there.

Then!  Then she had to call back to cancel Kristi's.  She got a different rep this time, a real go getter who didn't want to have to cancel the account.  Eventually the banker passed the phone to Kristi who dodged some questions, and finally after a few minutes, Kristi said, "It's not you, it's me."  The banker and I laughed so loudly that Kristi had to cover the receiver.  We laughed about it for a good few minutes afterward and then left.  Just remember, when you want to cancel your credit card, you have to use the classic breakup line, "It's not you, it's me!"