Sunday 22 October 2006

Pic of the day: Aaaaah! It's snowing bills! OK, my life is a lot less like that than most people. But still.

Where credit is due...

Earlier this week (on the 16th) I applied for a new credit card. Skandiabanken, the Swedish Net bank in Norway, is generally always cheaper on everything. So when they started offering credit cards, a couple months ago, I was interested. But I reasoned that there was no way I would qualify, since I already had unsecured credit elsewhere. Two other places, actually. This hails back to the botched move last winter, and although I have been paying an amount equal to a cheap portable computer each month, I'm still not finished. I won't be until a year or so after the whole sorry thing. And who knows what may have happened by then.

Well, this week, as I paid my bills, I looked at it again. "What is the worst that could happen?" I thought to myself. Even if I was rejected, I would probably not even have to pay for it. Perhaps they would blacklist me for a while so I could not get their cheaper credit the next time I applied, but if so it could probably not last more than a few months.

The online application was really simple, and almost immediately I was awarded a credit of kr 35000, a bit over $5000 at this time. This would be enough to gradually move all my other unsecured credit over to this cheaper card. I am not sure you can use a credit card to pay off a credit card directly, but I would be able to use it to pay other things and then pay off the other credit from my salary. So over time I should pay less in interest and thus be able to pay off more.

Of course, that is how I see it. The way the credit card companies see it, I will likely be tempted to buy all the cool stuff that I could not afford before, and soon have maxed out all the credit, and be their slave forever, muahahaha!
(There is a tiny core of truth in this, as we shall see later, if I remember to write about it. ^_^*)

I assume they will send me a physical card with an expiration date on it and stuff. But I have not received one as of writing this (and I am writing this almost a week delayed, twelve days after I applied). Oh well. If it does not show up within a couple weeks, I guess I shall have to write them about it. Or if it starts racking up charges. As it is, I just write it because this too is part of my life. And because I probably still have a few Norwegian readers who deserve to be reminded that Skandiabanken is the best at what it does.