Balance Transfer’s and HSBC, Plus my new 1 year financial plan

Balance Transfer’s and HSBC, Plus my new 1 year financial plan

So part of my financial plan for the next year is to pay off my dads loan, which is currently at $5000 with 24% interest rate (ridiculous!). I’ve come up with a plan that will allow me to have it paid off by September of next year. Though I did run into a snag this morning when trying to transfer the balance to my credit card.

HSBC (or technically a subsidiary of theirs) apparently only accepts checks or cash as a payment method, which I don’t have since I’ll be using my credit card. So I called up USAA and they said they could provide convenience checks which would allow me to send off a check to place the balance on my credit card. Normally this would cost me 3% transfer fee and use my normal rate of 16%, but they have a “promotion” that will waive the transfer fee and bring my APR to 4.4% for 12 months.

I’ve decided to go ahead and take this in order to get the loan paid off, but then next month or the month after I’m going to get a 0% APR for 12 months card to transfer the balance again.

Then the amount my father was paying on the loan will then be paid to me, and once my car is paid off in February, I will have put $1300 down on his loan, bringing it down to $3700. Then I will start adding my car payment to his payment, bringing it to around $500/month we are paying towards the remaining balance.

$3700 – $500/month payment means it will be paid off in about 7 months, which should be around September of next year.

I’ll probably continue to put the $500/month away for an extra 3 months and pay off his medical bills balance of $1300, assuming he doesn’t rack up anymore hefty medical expenses.

Then my father will be debt free, and I’ll just have the remaining balance on what my friends have loaned me for the house, if I haven’t paid them off by then. Plus the house, naturally, but since that’s a long term investment, I don’t really consider that immediate debt at this time.

Technically the first time home buyers tax credit needs to be paid back as well, but you have 15 years of interest free to do that. So that’s about $500/year, which equals out to about $42/month with no interest. So that’s easy peasy.