Climbing Out One Family’s Adventure in Becoming Debt-free

Today The Wife and I sat down across from a “banker” at Wells Fargo and walked away unscathed.

On the agenda was:

• drop The Wife’s checking account
• change the Dad’s to a checking account without a monthly fee
• de-link the over-draft “protection” credit card from the Dad’s account
• discuss the state of said credit card

The Wife also has a credit card with them that was “protecting” (I love that term, don’t you?) her checking account.  Together those two cards total $15k.

We went in with our first budget in-hand and showed the dear lady our plan.  I think we totally confused her.  She pleasantly made the account changes we asked for:

“You know you won’t have any protection if you overdraw your account and an item may be returned with an NSF charge, right?”

Yes, thank you.  You charge us the same charge to do the overdraft “protection” too plus the interest on the card so let’s just shove the whole thing while we wise up.

We were offered an unsecured loan in place of the credit cards, but I saw no advantage in it.

At the end of the day we didn’t really come out ahead in any way other than reducing our monthly fees a bit, but we do feel like we cleaned house and simplified our banking.

Hopefully tomorrow’s garage sale can bring us some traction in saving our $1,000 emergency fund.

the Dad