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I’m getting ready to close the books on October, and things are looking much better than expected. I have no idea how this happened, but I managed to spend less this month than I have since at least the beginning of 2005.
It helps that I have not yet had to pay the deductibe due to the car accident.
I’ll put together the details in the next day or so.
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The Balanced Life Center is organizing a “Season of Gratitude:”
The Season of Gratitude, is a consciousness experiment of sorts to see what can happen in our lives individually and collectively when we focus on what we enjoy. It will run from October 24th through November 22nd, 2006.
This sounds like a great project leading up to the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States. I’ll be participating over the next few weeks in some form.
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After recently finishing the last of my formal education (so far), I was able to consolidate my student loans. I received two pieces of information in the mail from the lender, one good and one not really that good. First, the good news.
You are eligible to receive a 0.25% interest rate reduction when you enroll in our automatic payment program… Enrollment will save you both time and money, and will prevent any delayed or forgotten payments.
This would lower the interest rate from 4.25% to 4%. That’s a good deal. However, another piece of mail — you know, they could probably lower their interest rates further if they’d stop wasting so much paper — makes me want to accelerate my payments as quickly as possible.
The lender has provided an amortization schedule for the approximately $20,000 I have in student loan debt (outstanding undergraduate loans plus graduate loans I didn’t pay back with my reimbursements). Even with a cool 4.25% interest rate, after the twenty-year schedule they suggest, providing a monthly payment of $127.04, I will pay $9,973.84 in interest before this loan has completely disappeared.
That is way too much money to spend on interest in my opinion. While some people say it’s not horrible to carry debt at favorable rates, and I may agree in some cases, I need to find a balance in order to avoid the interest payments that add up to a massive amount year after year.
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Ann C. Logue is the author of Hedge Funds For Dummies, which was recently released. She contacted Consumerism Commentary and offered to send a book for my review. I’ve been interested in hedge funds, and specifically in what individual investors can learn from these investments which are normally closed to everyone but very high net worth individuals and organizations. I agreed to review the book, and Logue has provided an excerpt: 
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Luke Landes founded Consumerism Commentary in 2003 and has been building online communities since 1990. Luke, also known as Flexo, has contributed to PC World Magazine, US News, Forbes, and other publications. Read more about Luke and about Consumerism Commentary.
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