the buggers!

[winterbadger]

So, I have two credit cards. One has a huge limit, the other one has a low rate. I remarked I'd love to move all the debt to the low-rate one utnil I pay it off, so the fees wouldn't be so high, but I don't have room. A friend suggested I jsut ask tehm to raise the size of the limit on the low-rate card, so I tried that. And they readily acceded, raising my limit to double what it had been on that card.

So I went to transfer the balance, and they woldn't let me. In the meantime, the two card companies had merged,a nd they won't accept transfers from one of their cards to antoher. :-( B*stards! So now I have way more credit than I need, but I'm still paying the higher rates.

AAA keeps sending me debt-consolidation offers; next time I get one I'm going to see what *their* rates are.

Comments

[geekchick]

I gotta say, I'm increasingly glad that I never had to deal with the possibility of an IPO. The internal market was just fine for me, thanks, and I made a nice chunk of change off of it. =)

[winterbadger]

Well, that was where this all started. Id had a very good experience with the private stock system at Sparta, so when I joined SAIC I didn't need our division manager's encouragement that internal stock meant "free money" to plunk a good cut of my pay into exerciseing all the options they gave us.

But then our new CEO decided...well, lots fo things that I think are fundamentally bad for the company, but among them that we were going to have an IPO. I understand his reasoning, which I won't go into, but I think it's a fundamentally bad idea to give control of the company's stock, and therefore a sizable portion of its value, over tot he eggheads and fortune-tellers on Wall Street. The fluctuation of stock prices on the open market often has very little to do with actual performance of the company and a lot with guesswork, image v. reality, and other events in the industry wholly unconnected to the company.

But, I figured, an IPO for a huge government services firm can't go anywhere but up, so I sunk all my spare money into exercising those options I had remaining. And I'm sure I'll be rewarded when the time comes. But until then it means a big chunk of change I'd like to use to pay off my debts is stuck waiting on the pleasure of our CEO and BoD, which is annoying.