OP my reply to you is below...
..., a 20 lb bag of rice an a 10 lb bag of beans - those are not luxury items.
Vacations are not, despite rumors to the contrary around here, necessary for anyone's survival.
Going on the rice comment. For me, rice is cooked in a pan and a "rice cooker" is a luxury. A luxury I resisted paying for for years despite hubby. Hubby was raised in a Korean household where a proper rice cooker is the ONLY way to cook rice, and he's mystified that it can be cooked in a pan. Let me backtrack...I haven't cooked rice in a pan, other than risotto, for hubby b/c I always burned it when I did that! So anyway, finally hubby convinced me that if we wanted rice, we really did NEED the proper rice cooker. And lo and behold, it's much better. No more burned rice. For me, the cooker was a luxury. For DH, it was a necessity.
I'm glad vacations aren't an absolute for you. Probably a lot easier than for wanderers like hubby and I, who need "going away" just a tiny bit less than we need oxygen and water.
If you live on a bus line, a car is a want.
If you live AND WORK on a bus line, a car is a want. We live on a bus line. Two jobs ago, DH's job was NOT on the bus line. He already would have had to take 3 buses and left 2 hours before work...he wasn't going to add in another hour to walk the rest of the way.
...i'm cancelling our request for a membership.
alot of things have happened in the past and even though we have paid them off they still show as late/past due. even though we can afford it now i don't want to fork out any extra money since it was never even brought to my attention that it would be a problem. our guide told us we were approved.
OK, OP, your post reminded me of something that I remembered. Which is surprising, because I try to NOT remember things others have posted, preferring to reply to the post at the moment, not posts in the past.
But I remembered that you were going in on this with your sister, right? Did you go through with it? Is it your sister's stuff or yours? Because I remembered this, I was looking through your old posts...I noticed you mentioned your CA guide Jim; is this who dropped the ball? If so, I'm bummed, as he's our guide too! He was so great with us. And if there was anyone that expected to have to pay more deposit, it was us (or rather, DH, as I'm just the associate and not on the loan).
I do have to remind you that any extra you pay now is LESS than you pay in the future, and LESS plus 10-15% interest as well. It actually would work out better for you now, to not cancel on principle, b/c you'd pay less than you would have if the approval hadn't been provisional.
If you haven't finalized the cancellation, and if you have the extra right now...I'd think longer on it. It doesn't sound like you're having problems making ends meet NOW.
OH, and for your credit report, why not go through it online and make notes online on the paid-off things. We found that to be most beneficial to hubby's credit reports. That and getting stuff off...there were FIVE weird SS #s associated with his credit report! None were his! Doing that alone probably bumped up his credit rating by quite a bit. And all it took was letting them know through their official ways, that those SS#s weren't his. Anyway, we sort of "jump started" getting DH's credit report pretty AND accurate (some of the things they showed on there were 15+ years old, and paid off 10 years ago...they should NOT have been on there anymore) by doing all that. LIke a spring cleaning of sorts.
Hopefully that's of some help to you!
