WEST TOWNSHEND — My New Year's resolution for 2020 is to pay down my credit cards. Notice that I didn't say “pay off” my credit cards. A mere year would not suffice for that Herculean achievement, since I'm so strongly averse to taking on a second job robbing banks.
My debt and I go way back.
The first credit card I ever had was a department store card, which I got because I wanted a sweater, since it was winter and I was cold. (I didn't know about thrift stores yet.) Since then, I have spent my life running amok, using credit cards for medical care, car repair, anti-virus software, carrots, and numerous other luxuries.
Theoretically, I'm now in a position where I could pay the bills, continue to have those luxuries, and start to pay down the card balances.
The problem? Interest. At 20-plus percent, any funds that could have gone toward paying off the cards don't even cover the interest.
I have often gotten these unsolicited invitations to apply for “pre-approved” credit-card-consolidation loans, which could have solved my problem, but it turns out that those are only for people who don't need them.
Regardless of how “special” the invitation to apply may be, unless your income or wealth is so high that you could just pay off the cards, you won't get approved.
So I was back to bank robbery as the only viable option. I decided to give it a try.
* * *
Not having any cash for things like a ski mask, a fake gun, or a getaway car, I immediately rejected the Hollywood method and decided to go about it in a way where the bank wouldn't provide any significant resistance.
Shh - don't tell the banks what I'm about to tell you.
You see, mixed in with the disingenuous loan offers, there are balance-transfer offers. They are so common as to be practically invisible, but the other day I accidentally opened one, thinking it was a piece of real mail.
Intrigued by what it said, I dug through my unprocessed junk mail and discovered that quite a few banks were eager for a piece of my debt, and the ones that already had a piece wanted more of it - so much so that they were willing to temporarily take away some of the interest burden.
That made me suspicious.
The job of banks is to profit from people's financial problems, so it seemed unlikely that they would do anything to alleviate those problems. In light of this, I went back to the recycle bin and retrieved the paperwork that came with the offers so I could find out what was in it for the banks.
Terms and conditions statements are almost as horrifying as privacy policies. That's why they are so long - to bury the horrifying parts where they won't be seen, since the entity with the Terms needs people to “agree” to what is about to be done to them.
But since I was out of Stephen King novels, this seemed as good a way as any to scare myself.
I waded in.
* * *
The collective theme of this paperwork was that the banks all wanted to take my debt away from each other. If I could navigate the minefield of their terms, I figured, I could use that to my advantage.
Except the minefield was also a maze.
One term/condition that proved universal was that debt couldn't be transferred between two cards owned by the same bank. While it may appear to you that your Amazon card and your airline card are totally different, they could just be two different ways that the same bank went about getting you to owe it money.
That part got a little confusing for me, so I simplified it by thinking of it in terms of the warring factions in Syria.
For example, the Russia-Assad-Iran alliance would be like Mastercard - irrelevant. It isn't the collective that matters; rather, it is who is capable of entering into an alliance.
In my scenario, the banks were those alliance-forging entities, and I was a civilian trying not to get blown up or asphyxiated by chemical weapons. (I had already been turned down for asylum in Europe - or for a debt-consolidation loan, if you want to look at it that way.)
Since the U.S. doesn't do alliances anymore, I assigned America to Care Credit and took that card out of the picture. Along similar lines, I decided that ISIS and Al Qaeda were like payday-loan operations, and I took them out, too.
That left me with an Iran, a Turkey, a Russia, and a Free Syrian Army, which meant that I needed either a Kurd or an Assad to get the ball rolling. The Kurds seem to be out of the balance-transfer market for the moment, so I got an Assad.
The Assad gave me enough credit to pay off one card. Since the Russia card intended to apply my monthly payments to interest-bearing debt first, I paid it off with the Assad and then transferred the Iran balance to Russia.
The Turkey balance went to Iran, and the Free Syrian Army was going to go to Turkey, but apparently there had been a merger, so that wasn't possible.
One more card, and I would be home free.
I sifted through the pile of offers again and came across a Hezbollah. I had rejected that one at first because it was the same bank as Iran, just headquartered in a different territory.
“Eureka!” I said to myself. I could have both a Hezbollah and an Iran, as long as I didn't pay one off with the other, so I got the Hezbollah and used it to pay off the Free Syrian Army.
* * *
In my own totally insignificant but non-violent way, I had pulled off a bank robbery.
Maybe.
These banks are all assuming that I won't be able to pay down the debt and will only add to it. The Assad is already pretending to care about my emotional well-being by encouraging me to take a break and use my credit card for life's adventures.
Fortunately, I'm not that suggestible, and I certainly don't believe that the bank gives a hoot about my lack of opportunities to relax.
None of these players are aware of my individual existence, just as Putin and Assad don't personally know the people they've been killing all these years.
Yet, for a mere 3.5-percent average fee, I've gotten a 12-month cease-fire out of them in my little corner of the metaphorical Syria, guaranteed by troops from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
But if I could transfer that bit of peace to a real Syrian civilian, I would.
Would you?