Big day for PCB

Yesterday marked a significant milestone for me. Some of you may recall that last year, almost to the day, I had a most spectacular financial meltdown. I went to see the bank and they helped me out but I had to borrow £5000 from them. I was paying it off and at the original agreed terms, I would be paying it off until August 2008.

Yesterday I paid off the full remaining balance of £3350. I was almost light headed with joy after I left the bank. I have had a bank loan of some kind now for eight years, since I took one out to pay my student loans. So this week marks the first time since 1999 that I haven't had approximately £50 of my paycheck taken out for a loan repayment EVERY WEEK. I now just have the credit card to pay off and I will actually be debt free for the first time in over a decade.

TV owns my soul: Part 2

I did some maths last week. While nothing about a move to NY is certain yet, it is all looking fairly good. And while I can't sit around and daydream about it all, in some ways I have to act like it's definitely happening. And the one major way I have to do that is financially. In order to afford everything this NY dream will cost me, I have to start saving £200 a week. Every week. Starting now. This figure is not unfeasible, mercifully, but it does mean that I am in for a long stretch of not much fun. And I am totally ok with that if I know that it means when it's over, I'm living in Manhattan.

So therefore it's quite handy that two weeks from today, I will be juggling the following TV shows:

24, Lost, Ugly Betty, Prison Break, Nip/Tuck, Supernatural, The Dresden Files, Rescue Me, Bones, Medium and Heroes.

A couple of shows I originally was planning on throwing into the mix have been kicked to the kerb and once all the above end their respective seasons, I have three seasons worth of Battlestar Galactica to get through. So I think I have enough free entertainment to distract me from the dullness that will be my life.

Best of times, worst of times

I'm going to be on a plane in like 18 hours. I'm a little bit freaked out. Last time I went to NY in November, I didn't have a good feeling about it all. To the degree that a little voice inside me told me to turn around and go home when I was checking in.

Well, in that vein, for the first time in two years, I have a bitch of an infected wisdom tooth. I am not registered with a doctor OR a dentist and I've been reduced to gargling with antiseptic, which is just the wrong side of no fun, let me tell you.

Counterbalancing that, I had some fantastic news today. Remember how I blogged a while back that I was going after my bank to reclaim the unauthorised overdraft charges, since these had been declared unlawful? My bank have rinsed me for £1046 in the last three years. They've had my complaint since mid November and I've been calling them weekly and making vaguely threatening noises if they don't give me a resolution asap. They wrote to me today to tell me they'll repay £846 of the charges. I could take it further and get it all back plus interest but fundamentally I don't want to drag it out any further. This is all an unexpected windfall so it's fine by me.

If ever there was a sign from the universe telling me that getting on the plane tomorrow was the right thing to do, this would be it.

Secure Mail, my ass

Two weeks ago, the night after a work party, I lost my ATM card. I was walking to work, using my card to put credit on to my cell phone and I guess I dropped it and, in my hungover state, didn't notice. So when I got home that night, I called the bank and reported it lost. Fine.

One week later, I received a letter from Secure Mail Services telling me they had a delivery for me that required a signature from me and me alone. Fine. They also informed me that they'd recently tried to deliver it and been unsuccessful. Lie. You then have to call or go online to reschedule the delivery. But if you don't do it by 4pm, then you can't have it delivered next day. I only got home from work at 9:30pm. As it's the Friday before Christmas, the earliest time I can have it delivered is the 27th. Annoying. So I reschedule it. My housemate isn't feeling that well so she'll be home when they deliver. The delivery window is a fabulously non-specific 9am-5pm. At 5pm, she calls me to tell me they didn't deliver. So I called Secure Mail Services and had the following conversation:

Me: Hi, I'm calling about a delivery
SMS: Yes, we have it scheduled in for you tomorrow
Me: I arranged it for today
SMS: We have you down for the 27th
Me: Which is today
SMS: Oh. (pause) Well I can see we tried to call you on the 23rd
Me: No you didn't
SMS: yes, we have it recorded here that we called your mobile at 11:50am
Me: No, you didn't. What number do you even have for me:
SMS: *reads the correct cell phone number to me*
Me: well, I had no missed call, no voice mail, no nothing on the 23rd from you.
SMS: I don't know what to tell you..
Me: Evidently
SMS: But we did try to call
Me: Uh huh. Just deliver my card please


And so yesterday they did. To my housemate. Who didn't sign anything for it. Whatever!

A summary

So, what has been happening, other than my boss not knowing what buggery was? Actually, not a huge amount. I obviously have a new laptop and the story behind its purchase is a whole entry in itself. That’s coming, so stay tuned.

I did get to see some of the movies on my radar. Starter For Ten, The Prestige and Saw III to be exact. I have to say I really enjoyed Starter For Ten. James McAvoy is always fun to watch and he elevated the material to a whole different level with the kind of performance you don’t usually see in a flimsy rom com. Rebecca Hall was also utterly fantastic as one of the two women he finds himself drawn too. Ms Hall also turned up in The Prestige as Christian Bale’s doomed wife and on the basis of these two performances, I would say she’s going to be a name to watch. The Prestige was great, though I got the feeling it has been massively over simplified from its source novel. I guessed all the twists before they happened, anyway. Scarlett Johansson gave her first below par performance, bless her. She was struggling so hard to do a British accent, she totally forgot to act. And she sounded like me when I do an impression of someone doing a bad accent, which didn’t help. Saw III was shit. Not even worth talking about.

Work trundles on aimlessly enough. The summer backlog is well and truly out of the way though, we say amen and hallelujah. Financially that’s not a good thing as it means bye bye overtime. Gutted. On the other hand, it turns out that overdraft charges have been deemed unlawful in the UK and if you go about it in the right way, you can reclaim six years worth of charges back from your bank. I went through three years worth of internet statements (thank GOD for internet banking) and mine have charged me £1046. So I’m in the process of sending letters to get it all back.

Which brings us neatly back to the story of How I Bought My Laptop. I went to New York for a long weekend. There were many reasons behind it, not just my overwhelming need to own a new laptop. The full story of PCB Takes Manhattan will follow soon enough.

Not waving but drowning

Well it's been quite an intense week here at PCB Central. On Good Friday, I discovered I had no money. I was very far into my overdraft. This was a huge surprise to me. I thought I had plenty of cash, plus I'm working and getting paid so surely I'm loaded. Nope. Now, I currently use Smile, the internet branch of the Co-Operative Bank. I used to have a bank account with HSBC. I have a loan and a credit card with them. I decided to log back into my HSBC account and see what was left and apply for a consolidation loan with Smile. And that's where things started to go very very wrong.

See, when I was with HSBC, as well as my current account, I opened a household account. Because I was being paid weekly and my housemate fortnightly, I thought it would be wise to have an account we paid into on each pay day for all the monthly bills. Sensible, no? No. That account has an overdraft limit of £150. When we parted ways in July, I for my NY dream, her for marriage, I left it to her to sort out final bills etc, which she did. And the house account should have been at zero balance. When I look on Friday, the house account is £375 overdrawn. Oops. So I tally up my debt and apply for the loan with Smile. On Tuesday, I am of course turned down flat. I had a backup plan, which was to go back to HSBC. So on Tuesday I called them and that's where things went even further astray. See, for the loan repayment, I opened an account that I paid into weekly and the loan payment went out of it monthly. Makes sense, right? Wrong. When I moved it to Smile, the payments took a few days to clear, and one month, there wasn't quite enough money in the account for the repayment. And that has had a knock on effect and I have now, unknowingly, defaulted on six repayments. And for each default, I've been charged £30. Shit. So I spend an hour on the phone with HSBC and it's no fun and I have to go into my nearest branch on Friday.

So I went. And it turns out, they couldn't really do anything for me. See, with HSBC, every account holder has a "behavior" score out of 99. If that score drops below 24, no in branch decisions can be made regarding your account, it has go to a central department who will contact you by phone. My score is 13. This is about as low as it can get apparently. Fun. But a very sweet man explained everything that would happen and basically, it's all going to be ok. It's going to be a little bit sucky for a little while, but I can dig myself out of that hole fairly easily. It involves them loaning me £5050 but I'm ok with that.

But those of you keeping track might remember that the New York company who are hiring me mentioned they would pay my legal fees and levy it from my salary. Well, with my H-1 visa application starting next week, they told me on Friday they can't cover my fees. And I'll have to cover their fees too. So that means I'll have about $5000 more debt to play with. And I think I have to pay half up front. Woot.