I started back up in credit counseling yesterday. Hubby and I were re-going over our Dave Ramsey budget, and while we can make our payments on the credit cards, the 28% interest on First Financial is killing us. $80 in finance charges each month. We had been in credit counseling (we went through consumercredit.org) two years ago, but stopped a little over a year ago because we could no longer make the monthly payment of $400 or something like that. We sold some property, paid off a couple credit cards, settled with one, and now are down to First Financial, Discover, USAA, and Sallie Mae (student loan). First Financial is nasty nasty nasty on the phone, they do the good cop, bad cop routine, and if I don't pick up, they call and harass my parents. Which is illegal, but they do it anyway. So we're going to try and get the rate down so we can actually make some progress on the account and get them out of our lives. If it weren't for contacting my parents, I'd likely just let them go and settle with them after we get a tax refund (we're broke, so we get the 'un' earned income credit). But I don't want them to harass them, so hopefully this works and we can make some progress.
Read more...