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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: December 5th, 2023

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  • My credit card offers 0% interest on terms 3-12 months with any purchase over $75. You also often get offers like this at checkout for most online purchases these days. I would hope that’s where most of this is coming from.

    They’re a “good deal.”

    The catch is budgeting for this. It’s very easy to have these little purchases snowball on you if you do it for literally everything like is being pushed by creditors. If you don’t take the full amount of the purchases out of your budget, and then spend that extra cash, then all of a sudden next month when you’ve got a $200 payment due on groceries and your Amazon purchase, you’re short. Then you can’t pay your credit card in full, and have to roll over the balance and start paying interest. That’s the game they’re playing here.

    Do this over several months and the payments can really add up quickly. If you don’t have an actual budget process, you can get yourself in a bind really quickly.




  • It should be noted that this shift has happened in the last 30 years or so. Before that civil servants were the norm and contractors the exception. Civil service used to be a very good job that had some of the best benefits you could find, including some of the last remaining pension programs. You could live a very decent middle class life being a civil servant. Contractors are no cheaper for the government but it does move the liability from them to a 3rd party private employer. And now all the money goes to the business men who get the contracts and pay their employees a pittance with nearly no benefits.