How to repay credit cards

Yup, this has nothing to do with writing. And isn't spam :-)

Do you have maxed out credit cards which you repay at the minimum amount every month? Me too.

Or rather I did but then I thought of some very obvious facts:

First: If you have a maxed out credit card you stop using it, right? Which means that you are able to survive without the credit card. You may as well not have it, it has no money on it so you can't use it. Obvious.

Second: But you are servicing that credit card every month (hopefully). You are repaying the maximum amount you can on the credit card - and surviving. That means that you can survive while paying out that amount of money every month. Obvious.

Do you have any idea how long it takes to pay off a credit card at minimum rate, assuming you never took anything else out of it? If it's £5000 that would be at least 20 years. And you'd pay vastly more than £5,000 with the interest charges.

Okay everybody knows credit cards are bad. They are the bread and butter (and the champagne) of the banking world - who love people who pay the minimum. So why play that game?

Let's just reiterate those points: (1) You can survive without the card, because you already have to; (2) You can pay off the minimum amount every month because you already do.

So, stop paying the minimum amount and pay a fixed rate at the current minimum.

Let's say you have to pay £200 per month into your credit card as the minimum. Well pay £200 every month, fixed rate. Even when the minimum per month starts to go down, keep paying the £200. Why? Because you'll pay it off much faster, you'll be no worse off and you'll pay far less in interest.

Now if you, like me, have multiple maxed out credit cards this gets even better. Let's say I have to pay £150/ month on one and £200/month on another. Once I've paid off the one with £150 I transfer that £150 to the other one.

I'm still no worse off but now the second card is getting paid off at £350/month. So it gets paid off even faster.

Yes, of course, it takes discipline. If you're the sort of person who just has to spend money if it's available this won't help you; you'll just have to go on suffering and continuing to pay bankers to keep them in the lifestyle to which they are accustomed.

Personally I'd rather have the money for myself because once you've paid off those cards, and any other debts, it's all for you.

Simples.

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What's on the turntable? "Die Mensch Maschine" by Kraftwerk from "Minimum-Maximum"

Which witch is which?

As you can see my progress bar is nearly at 50%, I wrote about 5 pages this evening. This section is a bit dialogue heavy and will need some re-writing to trim it and look to see how to clarify the intentions of the various characters within the scene. (Currently it's a bit wishy washy.)

But the two groups have now met. Handling six major characters is quite tricky but we shall see how it goes. This evening on the train I spent some time looking at the different relationships you can have between Gwen, Ianto and Jack on the Torchwood side as opposed to Annie, George and Mitchell from Being Human.

How could the characters interact? What are the similarities and what are the differences? Where will they agree and where disagree?

There's lots of really juicy character stuff you could do, but I'll have to limit it. There's one particular thing I have lined up, poor George he always seems to end up in pain and poor Jack, always winds up dead...

My US Army expert, we'll call him Robert (because that's his name), got back to me today though I haven't read his notes apart from the introduction. Since I'm working on Which I don't want to get side-tracked back to Unit X until I've got the notes from Philip Shelley as well.

Still he was reasonably complimentary "There are many times that you get the military attitude just perfect. What the soldiers would say, how they would act. This adds to the authenticity, believe me."

Which was nice.

But I know there's a bunch of stuff in store for me, that will be less nice. But I want to get it as right as I can within the framework of the story.

It's also interesting, and this has happened with readers on other stories, how on offhand remark about something they don't consider important reveals that you, as the author, have failed to communicate something critically important.

I tore my hair out in Monsters over the fact that every reader assumed that the main character, Chloe, was supernaturally strong - when she was just using one of the simplest Jujitsu moves to immobilise someone, that anybody can be taught in a few minutes. I'm not 100% sure I ever solved it.

And, with Robert, there was a throwaway comment that showed I had got something wrong. It should be relatively easy to fix - much easier than the jujitsu thing. Of course, not being a proper script reader, Robert is offering solutions as well, but I was expecting that so I'm not offended. I asked for his advice and he's giving it, for free.

So. Tomorrow is Friday and I'm not heading home in the afternoon as I usually do because I shall be in work on both Saturday and Sunday. Not a delightful prospect, it can be very lonely here. On the other hand, lots of time for writing in the evenings. Should get Which wrapped up.

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What's on the turntable? "Tubular Bells Part Two" by Mike Oldfield from "Tubular Bells".

Getting the reference

It was 1 hour and 28 minutes ago that I sat down to write this blog. How do I know? Because I wrote the "What's on the turntable" entry below. Then I killed the blog and have just restarted it, and it's the same song - and I have exactly 1:28 hours of Steely Dan music.

What have I been doing in the last hour and a half? I have been writing the Table of Contents for the planned reference book. It's a programming manual for a large and well-known publisher of such reference books.

I had sent some notes on what I thought should be in it to my co-author, he'd responded by expanding it with his stuff. So I took the TOC suggested by the company, and his notes on my notes and ran them all together, sorting them out into some semblance of a logical sequence and incorporating the headings of the publisher, just to show them that we're not ignoring them.

I had this rather nifty idea, since we need a website to demonstrate the principles we will be describing in the book why not build a website that will potentially make us some money? Along with the free advertising from the book. Mercenary, moi? (Hey! I'm 50, and though I'm not planning on retiring [what a waste of time that would be] I'd like to have lots of pennies rolling in so that I can live in the style I wish to become accustomed ... to.)

Speaking of plans. You might like to try this: A couple of years ago I sat down and worked out how much money I would need to generate in order to handle all my debts and do everything I wanted to do. The figure came out at about £300,000. Then I multiplied by 3.3333etc to round it up to a million. (I had my reasons.)

Then I picked a date which seemed a reasonable target: End of 2012. So I decide that by that date I would make £1m and handle all my debts and so on. Then I sat down and started working out ways that I could make the money required.

Last year was a good start but I mishandled the money and ended up back where I started. So this year I'm doing it better and getting more long-term money generating plans off the starting blocks. Obviously I'm never going to make a million if I go on doing what I'm doing, you need to continue to make the money to live on plus devise sensible schemes that can deliver in the future.

I actually made this plan before I discovered I had some screenwriting talent.

I don't really believe in coincidences, I do believe we are responsible for what goes on around us, both directly and indirectly (why can't I win the lottery then? Because there are millions of other people trying to as well). And just by making the plan, as I did all that time ago, my life began to change around me (like discovering I had a highly valuable programming skill and now having the opportunity to write a book).

I'll do some set-up work for Running this evening, get my notes out and have look over them, probably change them. And get some writing in wednesday evening.

Oh! I'm going to the Toby Whitehouse thing set-up by the BBC Writersroom - are you going?

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What's on the turntable? "Barrytown" by Steely Dan from "Roaring of the Lamb"