digging out of a stinky pile of debt after realizing we are well past fucked

My car insurance is up for renewal in June. I was thinking about this the other day and wondered if I had ever gotten around to changing the mailing address when we moved in February. I had not, so I completed a little address change online. This simple task cost me about $75.00.

Here is an email I just got:

Thank you for visiting the Allstate Customer Care Site. Your request to change your address has been processed effective 05/06/2008. Please allow 2-3 days for the change to reflect on your policy. As a result of this change and new rates in effect, your policy premium has increased by $74.12. The adjusted policy premium is $500.46.

Uh, wow. That sucks. I am wondering if they would let me change it back, even though I don’t live at that address any more?

I do not really know much about car insurance or the insurance industry in general. I do know that they tie your rate to your credit, which makes no sense whatsoever and I can’t believe people haven’t raised a stink about it. I also know that my credit score has went up considerably in the past 6 months. I also know that changing your address can make your premium change. I suspect it has something to do with the number of claims filed in your zip code or something. However, I have never had this much of an increase when changing addresses. And I would have thought that the credit score increase might have evened things out somewhat.

You know, I don’t like driving this much.  I don’t like my car. I don’t like the price of gas. I don’t like the price of maintenance and I don’t like this insurance increase or the price of insurance to begin with.

With the price of gas being almost literally arm and a leg I think that fuel consumption is likely to be on a lot of people’s minds. Tons of bloggers are giving tips on how to cut down your fuel costs. Apparently, the easiest way to do that is to slow down. An article on CNN stated that “every 10 miles per hour you drive over 60 is like the price of gasoline going up about 54 cents a gallon.” Yikes. As someone that regularly drives around 70mph or a bit more, that is, well, tragic news.

As the gas prices have been creeping up I have been slowing down. The speed limit on the interstate here is a disappointing 65mph. And you do not have to go too far before it changes to 55 mph. Guess who obeys the speed limit now? Me!

There are a lot of cops here with very sneaky hiding places. So, this slowing down things has likely saved me more than just gasoline. I have avoided speeding tickets and there have been times recently where I came up on a sneaky cop and knew I would have been toast if the gas prices were better.

So, that got me to thinking. If loads of other people out there are slowing down as well to save on gas, what are the cops doing? I suspect they are writing less tickets for speeding now. Wonder if they are bored?

Somehow I managed to miss the fact that we are cool enough for The Broke And Need Money Carnival 2 last week. And they totally are not scared of our name. A fun carnival with a fun name and a hysterical theme. Check it out if you also missed it last week. Many thanks to Hook Me Up! for including us!

Also check us out in this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance up at the Alpha Consumer blog at US News & World Report. By not being able to print our name they made us appear very mysterious. Or very naughty. You decide. Regardless, many thanks to Kimberly for including us this week!

And also find us at Tax Carnival #36: A Cinco de Mayo Tax Celebration at Don’t Mess with Taxes. And at the 58th Carnival of Money Stories at Free From Broke.

Be sure to check out all the great articles in the carnivals this week!

Last week I entered one of our posts into a blog carnival. It was not a great post, so I was unsure if it would make it into the carnival.

It did not. However it was not due to the quality of the content. It’s all thanks to my idea of a clever domain name…

I’m sorry, but I can’t include you in the carnival of personal finance until you get a family friendly domain name.

Yes, it is true. Shafted due to domain name. Isn’t censorship funny? And isn’t “family friendly” much like beauty and “in the eye of the beholder?”

If you’d like a refresher course on family-friendliness, check out what Wikipedia has to say about it:

Entertainment or information is called “family friendly” if it considered suitable for the whole family. In particular it means that it is not considered harmful for children, which may imply restrictions on engagement in, or depiction of, nudity, sex, violence, horror, crude language, etc.

Consider this a shout-out to all of the children out there reading this, a personal finance blog, because kids love those.

And for the record, we harbor no hostility towards families - just giraffes and hedgehogs.

Last Thursday I signed up for a free trial of Rhapsody. I only did so because it was a special offer I got in a MyPoints email and I am all about getting free stuff through MyPoints. If you are not already a member of MyPoints, what are you waiting for? Join MyPoints NOW! Seriously. You can get free gas cards from them, among other things. In fact, that Rhapsody free trial I did gave me half the number of points needed for one $10 gas card from MyPoints. But that is beside the point.

With Rhapsody you get a two week free trial. I decided to cancel it today while I was thinking about it. I did not want to forget and end up with a charge on my credit card - because you have to give a credit card for the free trial to start. And supposedly you get to use the account until the trial period is up.

Prior to signing up for Rhapsody I had done a free trial of Napster’s online music service. I preferred Napster when it was a file sharing site When I was using Napster I noticed that a lot of the things that I was looking for just plain were not available. I wanted to hear the Andrea Corr solo album - not there. I wanted to hear the latest Beth Hart album - not there. I wanted to hear the latest Aly & AJ album - it was there! But wait - only 3 of the songs were available for full listening. The remainder of the album just offered 30-second clips and you had to pay $0.99 per song for the entire song. Balls to that.

With Rhapsody I was able to find the things that I could not find on Napster. So, score for Rhapsody!

Both sites offered downloadable software as well as allowing you to play the music from their site. I tried out both options with each service. Napster would sometimes get a bit sluggish when searching for what I wanted. I did not have that problem with Rhapsody. However, with Rhapsody I did have the problem of the audio buffering, only it was more like skipping. That was a real problem. Of course, that could have been contributed to the memory hogging programs I was using at the time.

When it came time to cancel, Napster was a piece of cake. If you are still in your free trial period, you can cancel without needing to call anyone. That is a real bonus. I was not so fortunate with Rhapsody. Not only do you have to call Rhapsody to cancel, but actually finding the number was quite a chore. So, if you need to cancel Rhapsody, you just call 1-866-597-5465. Be warned though that their customer service is clearly farmed out to India, which was a little frustrating. However, I was pleased with how quickly I was able to cancel.

Both services state that even if you cancel before the trial period is up that you can still access the service. With Napster, this was totally true. With Rhapsody, not so much. My trial period with Rhapsody does not end until May 9th but my access is already disabled.

While both Rhapsody and Napster had their positives and negatives, I think that Napster came out the winner in the end. But I would not pay for either service personally. Get a 14-Day Free Trial to Rhapsody if you are interested.

I am pretty stoked about the so-called economic stimulus checks. I have no plans to stimulate the economy though. I plan on using it to pay down a little debt.

So, when I read that the checks were coming early I got excited. You see, my last two digits are “06″ and this week they were sending out money for “00″ to “20″ so I was expecting that money early in the week.

Yesterday it still had not shown up in my account. I was getting nervous here.

Luckily there is a toll-free IRS stimulus check status hotline that you can call for updates. All you need to do is call 1-866-234-2942. Enter in a small amount info (your social, your filing status and your exemptions) and then it tells you when your check is to be deposited.

I called it last night and it said my stimulus check is being deposited today.

I just checked my account - score! It’s there!

So, if your economic stimulus check is MIA, just call 1-866-234-2942 before getting all worried like I did.

Want some free money? Get $25 for free when you sign up with Revolution Money Exchange!

We live in an apartment. It is not a particularly nice apartment, but it is not a dump. The people across from us smoke. And that’s fine - if they want to do something stupid even though they have 2 small kids then that is their own thing. However, it becomes my thing when I can’t leave my apartment without walking through a cloud of smoke. You see, apparently they are in on the little secret that smoking is stinky and clearly they do not want to do it inside of their apartment. So, they do it outside where we all get to enjoy it. I’m so glad, as I never would have found the time to give myself lung cancer.

We also have smokers that live beside us. Our front doors are pretty far apart so you would not think their nasty habit would have much of an effect on us. Ha! These people apparently like to smoke in their bathroom, which is just great since our bathrooms are basically connected by the little fan in the ceiling. When we shower, we usually turn on that little fan to prevent the mold & mildew buildup in the shower. Since these people moved in, turning on the fan seems to just suck the smoke into the apartment. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense considering that the fan is supposed to be sucking air out. So, now we have to choose between cigarette smoke or mold & mildew. Of course, sometimes it does not matter. Sometimes you can just walk into the bathroom and be knocked over by the smell of cheap cigarette smoke. I love those moments. In fact, I just experienced one of them.

Renting an apartment might be a great choice financially, but it sure does suck sometimes.

I firmly believe that people will buy just about anything on eBay. I know this because I have sold some pretty random stuff on eBay myself in the past. But selling your debt on eBay - that really takes the cake. In case you missed it, someone in Pennsylvania apparently also thinks that people will buy anything on eBay and is trying to sell $103,245.11 of debt. So if you are debt free or only, say $10,000 in debt, and want to up those numbers, now is your chance to be over $100K in debt!

And just what is this debt made up of? Well, according to the auction:

• $48,815.56 Large part of home loan
• $12,439.49 2nd part to home loan
• $12,692.22 Student loan
• $11,840.03 2nd student loan
• $3,204.36 Credit card husbands
• $292.71 Credit card self
• $4,744.88 Personal loan home improvements
• $9,215.86 Ford Focus 2004
• Total= $103,245.11

The auction even says that you can take the house and the car if you want. But you do not have to. How gracious. No word yet though on if you get to take possession of all the crap she has been buying on eBay the past few months, as evidenced from her feedback profile.

We have a lot of student loan debt. If you look at the sidebar you will see that I am not joking. While there are a few private student loans in that mix, the majority of the loans are the super low interest rate ones. Currently the highest rate on the private loans is 8.00%. And our lowest student loan rate is 2.65%.

I was doing some thinking recently about all of these student loans and their interest rates. And then I was thinking about how you can get 8% or better return on some mutual funds. With that in mind, it seems to me that any extra money that could be applied to paying down student loan debt would be better served in a mutual fund with a good track record. I would think that as long as you are earning more than the interest rate on the student loans that you are coming out ahead of the game.

Is my logic flawed on this? I mean, sure, you could have a bad year with the mutual funds and not only make less than the 8% but even lose money. But still….it seems logical to me.

Many thanks to Money Under 30 for including us in the Carnival of Twenty Something Finances for April 21, 2008 yesterday.

And thanks to Can I Get Rich On A Salary for putting up in the Carnival of Money Stories #56—Once Upon A Time.