digging out of a stinky pile of debt after realizing we are well past fucked

So, I’m a little behind on one of my Sallie Mae payments. No big though, cause I plan on paying it before the next one is due. However, the payment that I am behind on are those evil private student loans that I got suckered into at UCF.

Well, every day this week when I have left work and turned on my cell phone there has been a message from Sallie Mae about how I need to return their call in the next 24 hours, yada, yada.

I’m only two weeks late, so really the attention is flattering. And I am quite stoked that they have left me a number to call that does not go to India! I posted about the horrors of the India Sallie Mae call center experience I had on Sallie Mae FAIL. For those of you interested, reach a US-based Sallie Mae call center at 1-888-629-0189. They are apparently open 8am to 9pm in every time zone.

So, anyways, I thought I would give them a call yesterday. Initially I was going to ask to stop my payments, even though you have to pay $175 to get a forebearance on the private loans. But as I was waiting on hold I got annoyed by the fact that they had already charged me a $26 late fee and that I wasn’t even 30 days late and they were calling me daily. That is when I got a call center employee. Here’s a rough transcript of our conversation:

Sallie Mae rep: How may I help you today?

Me: I had some messages on my phone to call you guys, so here I am.

Sallie Mae rep: Okay, can I have you account number? And can you verify your mailing address.

Me: (I give acct. # and verify address)

Sallie Mae rep: Okay, I see that you are currently past due $326.88, would you like to make a payment today.

Me: No thanks.

Sallie Mae: Well, you are past due, when are you planning on making a payment?

Me: Well, my payroll department totally fucked up my paycheck this week**, and I was gonna pay it all tomorrow when I get paid but now I’m not sure. I might pay some of it.

Sallie Mae rep: I can take you payment over the phone and post date it for you so we can take care of it.

Me: No thanks.

Sallie Mae rep: If you do not pay the past due amount it can hurt your credit. I can set up that post-dated payment today.

Me: Yeah, I don’t really care about that. And besides I can pay it online myself when I’m ready.

Sallie Mae: Well, you will keep getting the daily calls until you pay the past due amount in full.

Me: Meh, I keep my phone off all day anyways, so it’s no big.

Sallie Mae: Okay then…well…. thanks for calling Sallie Mae.

It was actually kinda fun. I should have offered to send them a drawing of a spider.

And remember, to reach a Sallie Mae call center in the US, call 1-888-629-0189!

**My payroll department totally did screw up my paycheck. They reset all of my withholding tax info so that the maximum tax was withheld. Wankers.

Having trouble getting a loan? Or at least getting one with a decent rate? Or maybe you just wanna stick it to the man and not let any banks make any money off of you. Enter Lending Club. Are you familiar with them?

Basically Lending Club is a network of people that lend money as a group to people like you and me that want to borrow money maybe at a lower rate than the bank will let us. And if you have the money to lend, well, you can make some money off of it just by lending it to people like me.

The max you can get a loan for through Lending Club is $25,000 and your repayment term cannot be longer than 3 years. You could use this to get a low interest car loan for example.

I was actually checking it out the other day to see if it could help me out with some high interest credit cards. It does not cost anything to submit an application and I just might do it. If anyone out there has any experience with them, good or bad, feel free to let me know in the comments!

Until this past week, I have used Dreamhost for my website and blog hosting. In fact, I had been with Dreamhost for three years and was set to renew for a fourth year on Saturday. However, I have known since early November that I would not be staying with Dreamhost. In the past, I would have recommended them to anyone. However, over the past year I experienced loads of downtime that cost me money.

So, I did some looking around and saw that Lunarpages Web Hosting had some good reviews and was WAY cheaper than Dreamhost! In fact, they are running a special (the same one I got) where you can get hosting for $4.95 a month if you sign a year contract – and you get a free domain registration!

I had a lot of WordPress blogs to migrate over and I was worried about that. However, it was a fairly easy migration. If you need to move your WordPress blog from Dreamhost to Lunarpages Web Hosting here are the steps that I took:

1. Upgrade your WordPress if you are not using the most up-to-date version

2. Back up your wp-content folder (I just used my FTP program to copy that folder to my desktop)

3. On your Dreamhost Panel, go to Goodies -> ManageMySQL

4. From there, back up your database for your blog using phpMyAdmin (additional info here)

• Log into phpMyAdmin
• Select the appropriate database
• Export
• All of the files should be in the ‘export’ box
• Make sure “SQL” is selected
• In the SQL section, put a tick in ‘Structure,’ ‘Add DROP TABLE,’ ‘Add AUTO INCREMENT,’ and ‘Enclose table & field names with backquotes.’
• In the Data section, tick ‘Data header’ and leave the inside boxes without ticks
• Tick ‘Save As’ and leave the template name as is
• Select ‘zipped’ and click ‘go’

5. Now, go to the LunarPages Cpanel and add the domain

6. Change the nameservers for your domain with your domain registrar

7. Install WordPress on your domain at the new host (Lunarpages) from the cPanel through Fantastico. (remember to enter your original user name and password for your blog!)

8. Once WordPress is installed, go to ‘MySQL Databases‘ in the cPanel and then scroll all the way down to click on phpMyAdmin.

9. Click on the new database that was created when you installed WordPress.

10. Then go to ‘Import’ to import the database zip file making sure to uncheck ‘partial import’ and click ‘go.’

11. Once that is done, use your FTP program to copy over your wp-content folder from your desktop to Lunarpages.

That’s it! It should work after that.

TROUBLESHOOTING

I did have some problems with two of my blogs. Apparently when I had upgraded the WordPress on Dreamhost the database did not get fully updated but it thought it did. As a result, when I tried to log into the blog I got an error when I tried to login to the blog. For instance, when I was in phpMyAdmin my database tables would look like ‘wp-0013nfne3-content’ instead of wp-content. The fix was that some of the tables could just be renamed but others could not. It was a trial and error process.

I also had the problem of none of my categories or blog posts working when you clicked on them. Instead you got a 404 error. Of course when looking at the blog it all looked okay till you clicked on it. I did some searhcing online and discovered that it was a permalink problem. So, I changed the permalink structure and it worked fine. Then I changed it back to the way I wanted it and it still worked.

The final problem I had is that a couple of the blogs were displaying weird characters in some of the blog posts where there were symbols like: &, ‘, “, %, $.

If you are looking for a new web hosting company I recommend Lunarpages Web Hosting. Their support has been stellar and I have experienced zero down time. And hey, the price is right!

In order to speed up the debt paydown process, the Bumblefucked household employs the use of ‘pay you to blog’ sites for our other blogs that we have. The largest chuck of our revenue for this comes from Izea’s PayPerPost. In fact, just last month our haul was around $1200 from it and our 2008 total was around $16,000.

Sadly, it seems that those days just might be over. Why? Because apparently Voldemort is running things now over at Izea headquarters.

Here is the evidence:

If this doesn’t mean anything to you then let me explain.

If you do the math up above you will see that in order to make $1200 in one month that is an average around $40 a day. Keep in mind that you can only do three opportunities per blog per day. Now, until January 15th the minimum payout per opportunities was $5.00. BUT – on January 15th Voldemort gained control and changed the minimum payout per opp. to just $0.50. And the muggles are very upset.

And in true evil Voldemort fashion, bloggers were not even alerted to this fact!  Apparently, this is supposed to be a market test that runs until the end of the month. And that means that this could become the new norm. Conclusion? PayPerPost is officially dead.

Voldemort – you really suck.

Good news for those of you that save the max in your 401k at work – this year’s contribution maximum is increasing.

In 2008, the maximum contribution for those under age 50 was $15,500. Anyone who turned 50 years old in 2008 could do a catch-up contribution of up to $5,000 extra. So if you were age 50, your max for 2008 was $20,500.

In 2009, the basic maximum for 401k contributions is $16,500. Those age 50 and older get a catch-up of an additional $5,500, for a total of $22,000.

The total contribution limit for IRAs is the same as 2008.

The maximum you can contribute to your IRAs is $5,000. Remember that if you become 50 years old this year the maximum is higher at $6,000.

**You can contribute to a Roth IRA if your income falls below the Roth limits. You’re allowed a prorated contribution if your income falls within the “phase-out” range. If your income exceeds the income range you won’t qualify for a Roth IRA contribution.

Do you have a LLC, corporation or partnership? If so, check out the free download of TurboTax Business. It is straight from Intuit/ TurboTax. And yes, it works as I just downloaded it myself. I’m not sure how long this is being offered for free – so take advantage of it today!

It includes free federal efile also. Note that this is for federal taxes. State tax returns for your business can be done with this program but the cost varies by state.

Retail price of this software: $109.95

Early last month I bought a set of stainless steel cookware from Amazon. It was not performing the way that I thought it should and I saw another set listed under a Friday sale and ordered it. Later that night I was doing some research and discovered two things.

1. The problem with the first set of cookware was actually my crappy gas stove in my apartment and not the pans. I also needed to adjust the heat with these pans compared to my older ones.
2. The new cookware set I had just bought, while cheaper, was clearly crappy as there were loads of bad reviews that I had somehow missed.

So, I sign back into Amazon in an attempt to cancel the order. Somehow, just a few hours later on a Friday night, I could no longer cancel the order as it was “shipping soon.” So, I did some research and learned that I could just refuse the shipment when it arrived and it would be returned to Amazon and I would get a refund just like that.

Ha!

So, the item was returned refused and I saw with the tracking info that it was delivered to the Amazon shipping dock on 12/15/08. By 12/24/08 my refund had yet to appear so I sent them a quick email to inquire about the status. I got a response that they had not received it yet, contrary to what the tracking info said, and that I needed to wait until 1/8/09 before contacting them again.

As expected, my refund never appeared and I was missing that $110. So, on 1/9/09 I sent them another email to check on the refund status. The response was that they had never rec’d the item so the refund had never been processed. However, they could see by the tracking that it was delivered to them and that they were going to process my refund for me.

So, the moral of the story here is unless you really want to be apart from your money for a month, instead of refusing an Amazon shipment to return something just bite the shipping cost and get a refund shipping label.

Today I had an interesting email in my inbox. What was it? Someone trying to scam me outta $25!

The subject of the email is: Please help my sister i know this isnt a very good way of asking for donations but please consider it

Email address sent from: meganbesler@hotmail.com

Invoice amount: $25.00

Note included with invoice: my sister amanda is 14 and has down syndrome. has developed a heart condition leaving her 6 months to live. me and the family have been trying to do something for her last xmas but cant afford it, if youd like to help, please email me for more information. meganbesler@hotmail.com or donate!!!

I logged into my PayPal account to take care of something else and noticed this:

So, what wankers, eh? I am thinking that I should not click “cancel” or else the scammers will know that they have found a live PayPal account.

Got something in the mail that might be of interest to people with more money than me. If you do not already have an E*Trade Securities account and have $1,000 to deposit you can get 100 free trades if you sign up for a new account by Jan. 31, 2009.

Just go to etrade.com/100trades or call 1-800-738-9619 and mention offer code BA10WEB.