Keeping Up With the "Jones": iPad Debt

My wife and I purchased 2 iPads on credit a few years back. It took us a while to pay them off but finally we did. We were so happy to pay off a Citi Financial store card.

Then the new iPads came out and we wanted them! The old iPads worked just fine but we justified upgrading because the new iPads were lighter and we could get about $300 trade in refund for the old iPads.

Did we save to pay the rest? No, we again charged up the Citi Financial store card with a great "no interest" for 12 months deal. Well to pay it off in 12 months to avoid interest charges we thought we would only have to pay about $75 per month and this would have had little affect on  our budget. After all the extras and warranty plans our payments would have to be about $150 per month and now that is really making things hard for us.

Getting the new toys and keeping up the the Jones has got to be one of the worst factors keeping our budget unbalanced.

Lesson:

Save up for all your toys to avoid the high interest and stress of owing money!

Have a great day!
Ian

Provision for Bad Debt and Recovery

I have never had any of my bad debt written off but when my father passed away from cancer 7 years ago some of his outstanding credit card debt was.

Just makes me think if credit card companies and other businesses have some sort of provision for bad debt. I know our family business counted on every penny we generated we didn’t have a special bad debt expense journal entry in our accounting books. Would a large accounts receivable for bad debt be considered a tax write off for a business?

When I was operating my taxi-cab business I had some bad debt write offs but it was not that much a very low profit to bad debt ratio. Bad debt recovery was on my mind but in the end having a few thousand dollars owning to me was not worth the hassle of trying to get it back but maybe I could have used it as a tax write off. When my taxi-cab business failed when I began to get tired of it I didn’t try to get my bad debt written off. I spent the next 2 years making payments out of pocket to pay off the business loans that I was given.