Borrowing Costs: April 2008 ($66.07, YTD $491.07)
Here are our April costs, 2 months late. When I ran the numbers it was nice to see that we didn’t spend any money in April on extra bank charges(late fees, finance charges, etc..)
Here is the break down for the month ending in April:
My thoughts on this category:
- My wife and I have been able to limit our banking and credit card costs until recently
With most cities having some form of free checking available and hundreds, if not thousands of credit cards without annual fees available it is relatively simple to keep these expenses low.
Until I started looking, I had no idea just how much money I was sending to the banks for the privilege of being their customer.
- Our student loan payments remain a reminder of the fine education we received and the good times we had in school.
The bulk our my loans are currently in forbearance and will go into repayment this August. We were able to get a small tax break on the interest paid on these loans so we are not in a hurry to pay them off.
- I continue to be in the dark about what my investment expenses truly are.
The finance industry definitely doesn’t want to be to clear on how much we are paying them each year for their services.
I know that our expenses are a little on the high side because the average expense ratios for our current batch of mutual funds is around 1.6%. I also scan my quarterly reports and I will occasionally find a $50 fee assessed for various reasons.
I was pretty satisfied with these results at the time. We had spent less than $500 on borrowing money during the first 4 months of 2008. This has obviously changed in the past two months which illustrates how quickly the tides can change.
