GeeCee's Not-Entirely-Original Miscellany

Someone recently mentioned in passing discovering their name and associated money in their state unclaimed property database, and out of curiosity I plugged my name in to http://www.missingmoney.com/ just to see what could be seen. There's at least one entry that looks suspiciously like it could be me (and possibly a second), so I fire off a request at the state treasury department website. Today, I get this:

We received your inquiry and it appears that you may have property to claim. The inquiry will be processed in the order in which it was received. Please allow 6 to 8 weeks for more information to be sent for we are currently experiencing a backlog situation. We hope to correct this situation as soon as possible.

Thank you,

Department of Treasury

Division of Unclaimed Property

Neat. That address is from ten years ago so these days I have no clue what the property in question could possibly be, but I'm expecting it to probably be something like the $5 remnant from a utility deposit. At any rate, it's a pleasant change to get mail indicating someone wants to give me back money rather than take it from me.

The credit card with the second-highest APR will be paid off completely next Friday, and the others are no longer anywhere close to their limits. (We'll leave aside that some of that is because one of them inexplicably raised my limit by something like 50%. Yeesh.) Go me.

I really, really hope to be able to mostly pay these off by the end of this year and keep them down to levels where they can be paid off in full each month, or in two months at most. I completely wrecked my credit right after college; now that I've mostly recovered from that, I don't want to find myself back in a situation where I'm struggling (and usually failing) just to make minimum payments like I was for those several years. For now, I'm putting any extra money towards paying off credit cards rather than into savings because the interest I'm paying on those cards is so very much higher than the interest I'm getting on my savings account. (I'm putting money in savings out of every paycheck anyway, but any extra I have goes to Chase right now instead of ING.) My student loans will be paid off in three months at the most. I wonder what it will feel like to be debt-free? I don't think I have been since 1991 or so.

If I pay off my cards and start saving right now for a house, I might have almost enough for a downpayment by the time I'm 45. :-P (Seriously, if you can find a single-family house around here that doesn't have some sort of major problem and is a decent size for $400K, count yourself very lucky. Or be very suspicious. 27% increase in median home sale price in the last year for this county, and it wasn't even the biggest jump in the area. Oof.)