Gather Little by Little

Last Friday, I wrote about the joys of home ownership where I mentioned some problems we were having with our new home: the refrigerator not cooling, a terrible sewer smell in the house, and the clothes dryer not fully drying our clothes. I need to add one more.

My wife and I started repainting last weekend. She just couldn’t deal with the green color that was throughout the main living level. As we applied the fresh yellow color, it became quickly apparent that our white ceilings had some type of sot on them. I did a little googling, and found that this is a by product of an inefficiently burning gas fireplace. Sure enough, inspecting the gas logs, they have black soot all over them too. So now I have to add a call to the gas logs company to my list plus repaint the ceiling!

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Yesterday, President Obama rolled out another portion of his economic recovery plan, the eagarly anticipated:  Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan (also called the Making homes affordable program).

The $75 billion dollar program which runs through June 2012 does two things: 1) Helps more home owners refinance  at new low interest rates 2) Provides incentives to lenders and mortgage servicers to restructure mortgages to more affordable levels. Details of the program include:

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• Mortgages for single-family properties worth more than $729,750 are excluded.
• Homeowners whose mortgage values exceed home value by more than 5% are not eligible.

Every so often we spend a weekend and just clean house. I don’t mean just sweeping, dusting, vacuuming etc. We literally, clean house. We look for stuff we are no longer using, things on shelves collecting dust, etc and sell them.  I’m always amazed at how much more relaxed I feel about our home when we have less stuff. Not to mention the extra cash we receive for debt snowflaking.

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I’ve written before on how to get out of debt using debt snowflaking even before PaidTwice came up with the great name and started the snowflake revolution. Since then I’ve gained a number of readers and thought it might be useful to discuss the concept of debt snowflaking again, especially as  it’s something I’m really trying to get back to now. I’m refocusing on my debt snowball again after it sadly melted.

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About 2 months ago I got feed up with my Bank of America credit card’s incredibly high interest rate (29.9%) and started looking for credit card options with a lower interest that I could transfer my remaining balance to. I was paying Bank of America more than $100 per month in interest alone and was tired of it.

While the number of options are declining, there are still a number of great credit cards out there offering zero percent balance transfers.

Discover More Card

The card I ended up going with was the Discover More card, and specifically the Discover More Sealife Collection Card. The Discover More card offers the following benefits:

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