5/31: #96, The Cost Of Relationships
KKK's Top 103 Posters
Number 96: Chave
I really don't have much to say about Chave. This is one of those cases where I know the poster has been around TSM for a while, but we don't interact that much. I'm entertained by a lot of what he does and plus he organizes that TSM Poster Tournament every year, which I know has to be a hefty undertaking on his part. And even though we here at TSM are all way too cool for such a stupid, petty popularity contest like this you have to admit it's entertaining, even though I have never won, which tells me the whole thing is rigged more than Bush's first Presidential election OMG SELECTED NOT ELECTED LOL2000! Plus he has nice teeth, and for someone who lives across the Pond from me, that says a lot.
And now a word or two from the expert panel I have put together to comment on the people I’ve listed. If you would like to be part of this expert panel (and you know you do), drop me a PM.
From Carnival:
Chave - Clique B in the house! Chave SHOULD be in the top 10. Chave has one of the best senses of humor on the board and he's always on fire. Plus, he's my connection to Klare.His ranking and Kotz's are the two biggest screwjobs as of yet on this countdown.
From King of the 909:
This guy likes football (the one that you play with feet) and he's pretty funny. I have nothing against him.
• I have always tried to keep money matters separate from my relationships. This is why whenever the better half and I started living in sin we had a formula for paying the bills. She would add up all the utilities and rent/mortgage and give me a monthly total. I would then divide that number in half and deduct grocery costs, which I paid for, from the tab and give her the adjusted amount. This system seemed to work fairly well, or so I thought. A few days ago, Mrs. kkk finally came clean and said that the amount of credit card debt she has accumulated over the years was too much for her to bear anymore. Now I constantly joke about what a cheap bastard I am, but there’s a reason for this. Unlike the better half (and our Congressional leaders), I don’t like the idea of racking up debt. Whenever my credit card bills come in, they get paid in full a day or so later. There have only been two instances when I had finance charges apply to me. The first was back in 2002 when the better half’s car needed some work done and neither she nor I had the money right away to pay for it all. The seasonal job I was working at the time was just getting started up again, and I needed a month or so before I could pay off the car repair's entire amount. My total finance charge for this purchase? Less than $2. The second time I paid finance chargers was after my wedding last year. The arrangement was that I would pay for the reception and Mrs. kkk would pay for everything else. Of course, I ended up paying for a few other things as well, and this running tab eventually had the better half owing me more than $2,000 for her share of the wedding bills. Sadly, I knew this was going to happen, and so for about three months I had to look in horror as I had to pay finance charges while I wiped out her share of the the reception bill from my Discover card.
Fast forward to the present. Earlier this week, after being told of her inability to manage money, I took a gander at some of her unpaid debts and, well, here are the highlights [Please note that for all these things I gave her my half of the costs when the bill first arrived for each purchase.]: 1) A bill for a bed purchased at least five years ago. With all the interest she paid on this we could have purchased a new bed by now. 2) A bill for the carpeting that was installed in our house in July of 2004. 3) A bill for vet care for our cat that died in November of 2004.
And then there was the crème de la crème. A $10,400 bill that she hadn’t paid in three billing cycles. The total amount of all these bills is over $20,000 (and let’s not even talk about school loans). After looking at all of this, I crunched some numbers and did a balance transfer on the $10k bill. Now a lot of the smaller credit card bills I can probably churn out in a month or so, thanks to the money I have been saving up to pay off the rest of my school loan. And thanks to the balance transfer, there won’t be any finance charges on the largest bill until April of 2007. By that time all the other bills would have been paid off, and I’m hoping that a good chunk of this debt would have been erased. We still have to make monthly payments on this bill, but the good thing is that instead of the money going toward finance charges it will go toward the principal. (Or is it “principle”? Either way, you get the idea.)
I think what really aggravates me about all of this is that she has a pretty good paying job and will be going toward an even better paying one in a few months. And all that money is being flushed down a really big toilet. Whenever this debt gets erased, I’m still going to be taking charge of what she does with her money. It’s sad, because I really hate doing this, but we has finally come to the realization that her + credit cards = disaster. Actually, I've known of this equation for some time, and now she has, too.
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