Nam Taf posted:

You have nowhere near enough. Rent alone costs more than AUD$120 a week here in Brisbane, worse if you're in Sydney or Melbourne. You then have to pay for your own food, etc.

Why not stay at home for now and spend the time building up skills and trying to work towards landing a proper job with your degree? If you then get a fulltime job starting when you leave uni, you can save up in a couple of months enough to move out and start renting. It makes no sense to do a degree if you're going to work in a supermarket in order to move out.

Eurekapile posted:

Can anyone help me figure out about loans?

I'm 23 and one summer quarter away from graduating college. I have $24000 in student loans, $6000 in credit card debt and a credit score of 712.

I make about $1200 a month currently, and in July I will start fulltime work at $4100 a month pretax.

I need to find a way to get about $4000 by June 11th to pay for school this summer.

I think my options are a private school loan or an unsecured loan. I checked with my school and I can't get any more federal loans this year.

What I would like to do is to get a $10000 dollar loan, pay for school, and use the rest to pay of my credit card.

Any suggestions on how I can get money? How should I apply for a loan? What should I watch out for? Suggestions?

Eurekapile posted:

I mean, I'm planning on paying it all back. I start working full time in two months (work and classes at same time). I just need some extra money for now.

polyfractal posted:

-Are there any good spreadsheets to use for budgeting? Use Quicken? I'm considering Mint as well

slap me silly posted:

Yeah, the retirement thread should be helpful. You can use 1-3 index funds with low expenses to create a very robust portfolio for any investment term. But considering your place in life I'm tempted to say your savings money should go into the superannuation or cash savings for now - you probably don't have cash accumulated beyond your short-term needs. Also make sure you are choosing something good for your superannuation, and put in enough to get the full co-contribution or whatever. Also note that I don't know much about Australia so I'm extrapolating here based on US stuff

UFO posted:

Is there anything I should be prepared to say/do when I go down to the bank and challenge their transfer?

Suicide Watch posted:

I'm pretty sure this would be the right place to ask this.
In Excel, if I have a data table with two sets, one labeled YES, another NO, how do I get an average of all the YES values and another of all the NO values? I have the YES set as 1 and the NO set as 0. I need an IF statement but I can't get it right.

Rodge posted:

Anyway, maybe I'll actually get somewhere on this, maybe I'll cave, maybe I'll start feeling really ill all the time again and forget, but I'd never even have thought about all of this stuff if it weren't for you guys. So thanks.

Rodge posted:

Merou posted:

I have a question about loan interest. I've noticed that if I pay more than the minimum amount on my car loan, the remaining balance does not reflect the additional amount I've paid. All that happens is when I get the next months bill, the additional payment is subtracted from that one. This makes it seem like regardless of whether or not I were to pay the balance early I'm paying the full amount of interest in advance.

When I pay my credit card whatever amount I pay is what is knocked off the balance owed. So if I owe 900, pay 100, it goes down to 800.

Why is my car loan different? If I pay 273, why isn't the balance going down by 273?


Edit: I actually just logged into my loan providers website to check my payment history, it seems like whats put toward the balance and whats towards interest is completely arbitrary.

For example, 10/3/2010 -$177.35 -$96.35
9/11/2010 -$123.30 -$150.40
Both payments were the same amount, left number is balance, right is interest.

LordSeXXXenb3rg posted:

Okay, the basics:

• Prior bad decisions led to my wife and I having about $20K of CC debt when we got married.
  
• I'm the sole income, since my wife is home with the baby. Even if we wanted to do external childcare, it was essentially as much as my wife was making, so that option's out.
  
• Mortgage, CC bills, student loans, utilities, and food budgets use essentially all my monthly income.
  
• We've been paying minimums on everything, and extra money in the budget going to the highest APR. Cards are NOT in use, and balances have been consistently dropping. Yay!
  
• We have a 2-3 months in emergency funds before we'd have to turn back to these drat cards.
  
• I have about $27K in 401k, $5.5 of which is in an active loan which we used to buy a car.
  
• I'm considering taking an $11K loan from the 401k (which is the max I can do - only half the vested balance is available for loans) to pay down CC balances and give us a little more room in monthly finances.
  

Is this a crazy/bad financial idea? I feel like an extra $70 a month can go a long way towards further reducing balances. Are there other things I should do first? We're already budgeting pretty close to the vest and no one will touch my mortgage for a refi since I'm at about 135 LTV. I call all the card companies every 6 months or so and ask about lowering rates, but no one's budging.

Here's the situation on cards, and my ideas around distributing the $11K.

code:

				Balance	
				after	New
			Min	401k	min
Userer	Balance	APR	payment	loan	payment
ChaseA	10355	12.24%	209	5125	104
ChaseB	491	2.90%	10	490	10 (lifetime 2.9% APR on an old balance transfer)
HSBC	175	14.99%	10	0	0
CapOneA	600	13.90%	13	0	0
Amex	1464	15.24%	33	0	0
CapOneB	4530	17.90%	113	1000	25 (1 year 0% APR on the remaining $1000)
401k loan				180
Totals	17615		388	6615	318

Thoughts, finance gurus?

Vestral posted:

Another point I'd like opinion on, I have a permanent part time position at my job, where I'm contracted for 25hrs/wk which cannot be reduced without firing me, and short of stealing/punching out my boss I'm not getting fired (go labour laws!) but work I 40hrs a week, the rest made up of casual hours. These extra hours can get cut, but in the foreseeable future, they won't be. I get the feeling I should budget with only my contract hours/pay in mind, but what would I do then with the extra $250/wk I'm actually making? Would I have a savings amount built into my budget PLUS this extra money?

Gloria Hole posted:

Ganon, I am not planning to return, except possibly for an occasional visit to family.

KennyG posted:

As with any legal answer, the short answer is: it depends. I am not your lawyer, but this is a terrible idea. Especially if you are going to go live in the EU. In 2011, the world is pretty connected. It will take them a very short time to find you, especially since as a foreign citizen you will likely need to register with the local government wherever you go. The bank will locate you and then file for judgment in a local court. Most of the western world has reciprocal judgment laws with the United States, basically your bank only needs to show up with a final judgment against you from a US court and they will honor it. I've oversimplified but the days of running off to the French Riviera to escape your debts are long over. You can't hide in the developed world.

Find a lawyer that specializes in personal bankruptcies and talk to them. A couple hundred to them may save you a whole lot in the long run.

Zeta Taskforce posted:

Can someone summon Murderknobs from the dead?

Guinness posted:

Likewise, I'm completely blown away by the number of people who gently caress themselves with a credit card. Where on earth do so many people get the idea that a credit card is just free money? A CC is a very simple concept, and following a couple very basic, very common sense rules make it pretty hard to get into trouble. I understood this when I was like 12, how can you be an adult and not "get" it?

kaishek posted:

Stupid question:

My wife unfortunately got scammed by a crying, apparently pregnant woman. The classic "my car broke down and I need to get home" thing, wouldn't take the $20 she had and walked her to an ATM to pull out $160 with a promise to pay her back and probably some fake information. Sigh. She's really embarrassed by the whole thing, and called me immediately afterwards. I tried calling the mall in the area where this happened to report an aggressive panhandler (it is illegal to solicit that close to an ATM for exactly this reason), and got transferred around to a few departments but the long and short is no one cares - not surprising.

My question is, there is almost certainly no way to recover this money, correct? It was an ATM transaction made under a type of emotional duress, but the card was never taken or used by anyone else. For the amount of money, it's big enough that it bugs me but not big enough for anyone else to care.

moana posted:

I think getting stuff like bedframes and couches off of craiglist is the way to go

Something Awesome posted:

While this thread has been amazing at answering one off questions I realize that I need some read education on how to get my ship in order and get myself out of the immensely depressing situation I have gotten myself into (broke, depressed, debt up to my eyeballs). Can anyone recommend any particularly good internet resources/reading materials that relate to unjamming a personal financial nightmare? I have google'd a ton of keywords but all I ever get is the same 1 paragraph synopsis on how "*THIS* is the e-book to solve all your problems!".

sweet_jones posted:

I was also fairly intrigued by the idea of having 0.5x of your salary in retirement accounts by 30, 1x by 35, and 2x by 40. I hadn't seen those recommendations before and have been stewing on those figures. Are these generally accepted targets?

Suspicious Lump posted:

Studying in Australia!

Suspicious Lump posted:

As far as I know it has always been if you earn 50k+ then HECS repayments start kicking in, what changes are you referring to?

Haifisch posted:

There are a few places where they take cash but not cards, surprisingly! I've been to a few concerts in tiny venues where the merch stand didn't take cards. If you go to outdoor festivals/markets/etc, some vendors may not take cards. I've never had a shared apartment laundry that didn't require quarters from you. And of course there's all the stuff alnilam mentioned.

I only use cash a couple times a year now, but when you need it, you really need it.

SBJ posted:

I'm in Australia so retirement fund is not really a concern. It's also not something I can use to invest (as all profits go back into the retirement fund, which I cannot touch until I retire).

Madbullogna posted:

Which kinda sucks, as logic (in my mind anyway), says that requiring a PIN is more secure, and thus there should be less fraudulent activity/use of stolen cards. If you went old school and had a debit only card, it's completely useless without a PIN. But if you have a regular debit/check card combo, (like virtually everything that is issued these days), you can steal a card and use it everywhere just by pressing 'credit'.

Merchants/vendors never bother to look at cards anymore either. I have written "Ask for ID" on the back of most of my cards instead of signing. Maybe once every 25-30 transactions does a merchant actually ask after seeing that. Hell, I once wrote in big perm. marker "stolen do not use" on the back of a soon-to-be-expired card, and for that whole month was never asked about it at any merchant. And people wonder why credit card fraud/theft is so popular these days....

Nierbo posted:

I just moved to Canada from Australia and have no plans of going back. What would happen if I stopped paying my australian gem visa credit card? (forever)