Friday 16 February 2007

Pic of the day: That's the same feeling you have after paying off not one but two ridiculously expensive loans. Life is good! (Picture shows Sakaki-san from the anime Azumanga Daioh, one of the funniest family-friendly anime ever made.)

Bye bye bills

Ah, the soft irony. I had already planned today's entry in my head before I looked at the year-ago entries. Actually I paid my bills yesterday, but I already had something to write about then, so I put it off till today's entry. And lo, it is a year to the day after I wrote about bills last time. At that point, I wrote about the loans I had taken to pay the double move. Today, I write about being rid of them. And of course, four years ago I wrote about Satan and credit cards. Six years ago I wrote about God's sense of humor. It is still there, I guess.

It all began about 16 months back, when my landlord informed me that they were selling the house. I had lived in the basement apartment for 21 years, so this was big news. I would not have minded living there fore 21 more years, but in retrospect it is a good thing that I didn't, because I just kept piling up books, magazines and used computers. One day I would have been unable to make my way to the door, I guess... OK, probably not. But it was pretty crowded. Not like here. Which is partly because I now have more space, but partly because I thought I was moving to a much smaller apartment, so I was pretty ruthless with throwing away stuff. Including very interesting old issues of Scientific American which I intended to finish reading, but hadn't done so for 10 years. So.. all in all a good thing.

But it did not go as planned. After having rented the small apartment for three months, I was not allowed to move in because I had too much stuff still and hadn't gotten rid of it in time. So I had to move here instead. By then I was already broke, and there were a heap of other expenses apart from continuing to rent two places for yet another month, and a deposit for the new place. So I borrowed enough money to pay all this stuff and some extra that I used to maintain my usual lifestyle while paying down the first loan (the one for the extra expenses). As I used to joke about in the past, pay your credit card with another credit card. Except they were not exactly credit card, but consumer credit.

Even so, like all unsecured credit it was hideously expensive. The price of borrowing is the interest rates, and these were so high as to qualify as usury if not for one sad truth: My fellow borrowers of unsecured loans are an unreliable lot indeed. Divorced, mildly retarded, frequently drunk or borderline crazy, sometimes a combination, that's as much the rule as the exception. I could of course tell the bank that I am not like that. But of course, so do they. This did not even come as much of a shock to me, since I studied them in a detached, impersonal manner back when I made Norway's best debt collection software (with some assistance from Sven-Kristian and May-Britt. I think it was May-Britt, I haven't met her in ages). Going through the files did not leave a lot of illusions, at least not more than SKH and MBS could finish off with vividly recounted stories.

So I somewhat stoically paid back the moderately grotesque loans over the duration of a year, during which I retained a perfectly normal lifestyle (for me, that is) despite paying something like the cost of a nice laptop PC each month, before the rent and the other bills. The last of these months being this one.

Yes, that's right. Oh, I have my expenses still, but starting next month, I have a lot more freedom in what I do with the money. Unless or until something happens again, which it probably does sooner or later. Still, the less one needs to pay for retarded delusional divorcees failing to pay their loans, the better. Or that's how I see it. Since I suspect very few of my readers are retarded delusional divorcees, I don't expect much protest on this one.