A big financial OOPS

Wasn’t it just two weeks ago that I was crowing about the major strides I’d made financially with paying off debt?  Oh, how the Universe loves to laugh!

It turns out that while I was so meticulously paying off that debt, I missed another credit card due date by two days.  TWO DAYS!!!  What a bugger.

As soon as I realized I’d done it, I went online and made the appropriate payment, including the $35 late charge.  I called the company to ask if my interest would get hiked up.  The woman told me that she could see my payment and because it was in the system before the next billing cycle started, I was fine.  There wouldn’t be any change to my interest rate.

But when I got my credit card statement the other day, lo and behold, the interest rate had skyrocketed to 29.99%.  Holy mother of *******!!!!

I called the credit card company to ask about the interest hike and was told that it would have to go through their resolution center, blah blah blah.

Here’s the miracle part – rather than freaking out, I started praying and talking to all my helpers.  “I’ve been working really hard and I’ve been making great progress.  I don’t believe that after all this work you would try to tear me down, so please show me a solution that doesn’t negate all the progress I’ve made.  I believe that you want me to succeed, so please help me to do that.”

It just so happens that I’ve had an offer sitting on my desk for about a month to do a balance transfer to a 1.9% rate with a maximum transfer fee of $99, no matter how much I move.  That’s a pretty amazing deal.  The thing is that for the last month I’ve been so nervous about rocking the boat (I finally felt like I had all my payments under control – why go moving stuff around?) that I haven’t taken advantage of it.

So the Universe has rocked the boat on my behalf, pushing the issue so that I would get off my a$$ and make the balance transfer.  I called company #2 this morning to ask some questions and spoke with a lovely young woman who was really helpful and mostly spoke in plain English sentences.  She assured me that there are no “gotchas” and even gave me a workaround to get more out of the deal than I would have known to do on my own.

So there you go – an unfortunate snafu turns into a money saving deal!

Thank you Universe!  🙂

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Image found here.