Paul T. Klein

Yesterday I paid off one whole card in it’s entirety. Tomorrow I will contact the card provider to cancel the account entirely. This was one in three cards I’ve taken out; this card was the one I lived on for most of last year. While this card does not represent a full third of my credit card debt, the fact that it is now paid off in full is beyond thrilling, and is a huge weight lifted from my shoulders.

I plan on continuing to make payments to my other two cards monthly in order to suppress them and finally reconcile them down to one card. Once I am done with this debt, I move on to student loans… I will most likely keep one line of credit open in order to rebuild and maintain solid credit. I never want to be in this situation again, however, and I look forward to the day when I can say I am entirely free of the chains of credit oppression.

I still haven’t been able to design and fully implement all my web ideas for my online social hub, but I’m moving in the right direction. Months ago I registered www.paultklein.com with DreamHost, but since then it has done nothing but sit, unused, unattended, dead. Sure, some of that had to do with not having a real, acceptable, steady internet connection for a period of months on my end, but that’s not much more than an excuse.

Today, however, I finally got something up. Following in the footsteps of my good buddy Jaryd Madlena, I set up a Magntize account for free, which acts as a sort of online business card. Then I redirected it to my web address, resulting in a “sort of” online hub. For now, until I can implement my own designs, this will have to work.

Well, clearly the first step in achieving this goal is having some sort of legitimate income… After all, being unemployed is what’s really driving me further and further into credit card debt.

But here’s the deal (and now, whether or not this is a good idea or not is beside the point)...

I figure one of the smartest things I can do to start this process is to reduce the amount of interest that is accumulating on my cards. My Chase card, for example, has an interest rate of 18.24%. So, in order to do this, I’ve taken out a final (seriously, final) credit card that will give me 0% interest for the first year. I’ll be transferring my balances from my other two cards onto this card until I become employed again and can start making large payments. This way, I can reduce the total amount I owe.

Once I’ve completely paid off my cards (I’m giving myself until the end of the year to do so), I plan on canceling one of the cards, as I don’t feel it will be necessary for me to have three lines of credit.

Here’s to hoping this works well…