Suze Orman, BoA, and savings.

Her new advice includes paying the minimum on your credit cards and socking some into a savings account. At first I didn't listen.

After reading a bit about this, and after Bank of America lowered our credit limit..........I started thinking.

We do have four savings accounts.
Travel, which is at zero.
ER, which is low
Mine, which is supposed to be at 1,000. But we've been using it for unexpected things.
DH's, which is used for yearly expenses such as car tags and birthday gifts.

If you notice, I've added a new side bar. It includes the balance on my credit cards and their limits. And how far I am to paying them down.
I also show a few savings accounts, I choose not to track DH's because it's more like a checking account that we only use every few months.

I've always felt like our small 1,000 savings would be good for us, and if anything really bad happened, we could use our credit cards..............
but not anymore! We're losing our credit, so we can't rely on having it there if we need it.

We're going to listen to Suze. On my credit cards with the lower balances, I'm going to pay the minimum due.........and put the extra that I planned to pay into our savings account. I have a new goal. I will still have the $1,000, but we're going to up our ING account to $5,000. After we reach our $5,000 we will figure 6 months expenses and put that as our new goal. But, the money we put into it will decrease, because at that point, we will start aggressively paying down our credit cards again.

We're also going to start adding to our travel fund. We have a trip to Cabo in July, but it is already paid for. In 2010 we are planning a long weekend somewhere in the US. Probably within driving distance. In 2011, we are going to Hawaii.

You see the BoA one over there? Since they lowered our limit we owe 98%. That card is getting zeroed out by May. We are getting a tax refund of $5,500. 1,000 will go to our new savings goal, and $4,000 will go to BoA card. We will also take some money out of DH's savings, transfer some with a zero percent offer to Chase, and some to Sears for a 3% offer. BoA will not get another penny of our interest.

The rest of the tax refund is going towards new toilets. We had to call a plumber in because our kitchen sink clogged up. We tried everything, but couldn't fix it ourselves. While he was here we had him look at our toilet, because it has been clogging quit a bit lately. He also looked at the other one. Both need to be replaced.