Finance and Fat

No, that is not a typo. That is exactly what I did. In fact, I just avoided paying an extra $30 on top of that with two days to spare.

I recently took on a new freelance project using Adobe Flex 2. I was mildly familiar with what it could do and I had known Flash fairly well (back around version 5) so I took the job and said I could do everything in Flex (yes, developers generally lie at the start of a project but don’t worry about that). 

The first thing I did was some reading on the Internet and I bought a couple of books. I also signed up for Flex video training at Virtual Training Company Online (VTC).  VTC sells their training sessions either for $99 per course (you own it) or you can subscribe for $30 a month and access multiple courses (you are renting). Obviously, the monthly rate is better if you are going to watch the video in a reasonable amount of time. I signed up and went through almost half of the video in the first week. Then I got busy and sort of forgot about it. When my next payment went through I remembered that I needed to finish watching the course and cancel my account in order to make this a good deal. Well, guess what, another month passed. Now I was up to $90 and I still hadn’t finished watching the course. I made a to-do item, I sent myself an email reminder and I even wrote down a paper to-do - FINISH the video before you make another payment!

I guess my title ruined the suspense…another month passed and I still hadn’t finished the video and I was now up to a total of $120. That is more than it would have cost me to OWN the video and I was still only about half way through. I should have been smart and canceled then. Instead, I wrote more reminders and promised myself I would finish it before the next renewal. Well, today I was sitting at work and for some reason the VTC payment popped into my head. I had that sickening feeling inside- did I really just blow another $30 on something I didn’t even use? I quickly logged in to my account and found that I had two days left to cancel before my next payment. Relief…I canceled and stopped the insanity.

I remember recoiling at the $99 price tag when I first looked at this training course. Now, I’ve spent $120 and didn’t even get full use of the product. I guess I’m too ’smart’ for my own good sometimes. The only lesson I can take away from this is not to sign up for a monthly service in the first place unless you really know you will make good use of it. I am often tempted by low monthly rates only to find myself several months down the road not using the service I signed up for. Just say no in the first place!

I spent some time recently cleaning out old financial documents and I found a credit card statement that made me laugh. I guess I must have been really desperate for credit and the opportunity to spend money that I didn’t have because this credit card was just awful.

I had to pay a $70 set-up fee and $69 annual fee and the interest rate was about 23%. The limit was $600 and there were no rewards or anything else that could even remotely begin to justify those huge fees. All I can say when I look at that is I can’t believe how stupid I was. I can’t believe how much money I threw away in an effort to spend more money than I had anyway. It’s disgusting really.

Fortunately, I got at least a little bit smart even before starting my official financial turnaround because I paid off that card last year and closed the account. If you have a credit card like that or if those sound like good terms to you, cancel the account immediately! Believe me, you will regret it later if you don’t.