As I mentioned in the post Bad Spending Habits — We All Have Them, even our best financial intentions sometimes get waylaid.
My confession: That nice $400 chunk I put toward credit card #1 last month? Totally negated.
Here’s how I did the dastardly deed
— Put our hotel stay after our friends’ wedding on the credit card. Had to reserve the room on the card, so why not just use that info to pay it off, right?
— Bought a Christmas tree from homedepot.com for $105, including taxes and with free shipping. Too lazy to go to the store to get it myself and pay in cash.
— Purchased a real domain name and two years of hosting for $120. I just slapped that stuff on the card. Now, I have to figure out how to migrate this blog from Blogger. But I’ve heard Fabulously Broke in the City has a great tutorial on this process — I’ll definitely be taking advantage of her generosity.
Non-budgeted credit card spending
— A $25 donation to Project Hopeful, as I pledged on J. Money’s $100 scratch-off lottery ticket experiment post at Budgets Are Sexy. I wanted to do PayPal, but forgot that I had just pulled out money and pushed it into our savings account. Poor planning on my part.
The result
All in all, the balance on credit card #1 is $12 shy of what it was before the last statement and payment. As my penance, I’ll be upping the next payment from $400 to $600, despite it being a month that includes Christmas shopping. That way, I’m still on track to finish it off in January with a final $600.
What is good about being paid every other week is that twice a year, I have a three-paycheck month. And the next one is January. That’s “extra” money for our credit card debt and savings account.
