Taking the long way around

There's a light at the end of the crazybusy tunnel! This weekend I am flying down to Pasadena for a meeting of an alumni committee at Caltech. But then I have several free weekends, with no travel. Yay!

Each day at work I'm figuring out my job a little better. It's been a source of frustration for me - being new to the team and the product we're working on, while the rest of the team seems to be so much more knowledgable than I am. I've noticed as I get older, these kinds of transitions seem harder. So I guess it's good that I worked in consulting while I was in my 20s or else I'd have serious trauma everytime I got a new project now!

I have been putting my head in the sand about a credit card issue I'm having. My balance has gotten pretty high, mostly because I haven't made the time to sit down and work on my finances each month, so I don't really know how much money I have, and thus just pay a few hundred dollars rather than the whole balance. After several months of doing this, the balance is now quite significant, and I'm honestly not sure if I have the money in my account to cover it all immediately.

Just a digression here. Yes, as a married couple, *we* are doing fine financially, and have the money to cover our bills. But TJ and I have a system for personal spending money where we each get a small sum to spend on our own, in our own checking accounts so we don't have to "answer" to each other about why he bought another motorcycle part for $200 or why I bought $300 worth of shoes in one day.

So it's that account I'm having trouble with. Which means I need to scale back/budget a bit. I guess the transition from getting paid 100% salary to 75% is finally catching up with me - I knew it would, but I hadn't exactly changed my lifestyle as a result.

But today is the day. I'm going to go through all the unopened mail from my bank on my desk, and get my account in order. (I mean really, it's just one checking account, with one monthly bill, so not exactly rocket science!) And come up with a plan on how to pay off that credit card. Somewhat conveniently, I lost this credit card on my last day of vacation with Kristin and haven't gotten its replacement yet (possibly in the unopened mail?) so I haven't had the opportunity to increase the balance any more. Which is definitely a good thing.

As insignificant as this sounds, it's causing me a whole lot of stress for the past several months because it's been "lurking" in my mind. I got into some credit card debt trouble in college and remember that stress and the feeling of "I'll never get out of this" and not wanting to deal with it. When I finally got a "real" job and could make big monthly payments to pay off that balance, it really felt great. I was ecstatic when I sent in the last payment for that giant debt.

So here's to not getting into that situation again, and getting control of this now before it gets out of control. Wish me luck!