Credit Card Presentation
Transcript: My Credit Card Experiences The Importance of a Credit Rating The Final Week By: Becca Layman Starting Out Did I Qualify? The First Week Why Others Qualified for the Loan Even though I didn't qualify for the loan, other people did. Specifically, the two-income-no-kids scenario could more easily qualify for the loan. The scenarios with higher incomes and lower credit card balances could lower their balances quicker. Therefore, they could more easily qualify. Application to the Real World My scenario was the two income family with two children. My joint income was $2,500 My monthly expenses were $2,300 I had $200 left over for my credit payments and weekly events. Just when I thought everything was going great, I realized that I put the wrong number in the the "cash" column around week 4, so I didn't have nearly as much money as I thought I had. Luckily, I made small enough payments to have a little bit of money left over, so I didn't have to restart or anything. In the end, I only had $86 more in my balance than I started with, which comes to a $1,586 balance in the end. These weeks were fairly slow going, and gave me some time to attempt to pay off some of my balance. I only bought the cheapest weekly items: hair dyers, going bowling, and a Barbie. I put them on my credit card unless I didn't have enough cash to pay for the weekly event. This was to keep my balance from getting overboard. I did not qualify for the loan. A teeny tiny bit more than 50% of my income went into payments, which is 10% more than the required amount to qualify. Even though my item wasn't much more expensive than $2,000, I still didn't qualify. The Middle Weeks This was by far the hardest week. I only had $200 to spare after my monthly payments, and my weekly event cost me those $200. I had to put that on my credit card, which increased my balance considerably. On top of that, we had just started the project, so it took me a pretty long time to get the hang of things. A credit rating is important because: It allows you to see if you can apply for a loan It allows you to qualify for mortgage payments It allows you to see if you even qualify for a credit card. This is one of the most useful projects I've ever done. It actually taught me that if I let my credit balanced get out of hand, I'll have many financial troubles later on in life. If I can't lower my balance, I can't get any loans, so I learned that I need to e very careful later on in life to not get a horrible credit rating.