Budget Update

I increased my student loan payments by over $600 per month.
That should speed them up a little bit.
But I still owe somewhere in the neighborhood of a million dollars on them, so it will still take a little bit of time to pay them off.

I am thinking about paying my car off with a credit card and then transferring the balance to another credit card so I can get zero interest for a year. Then I would have a clear title and could switch to liability only. I could save $150 per month in insurance costs and interest payments by doing this and if I added that payment to the car note, it would pay off an extra $1800 per year.
It may be too soon to do this, though. I'll probably wait until the credit card balances are zero and the balance on the car is lower. The reason why it makes a difference is that it would show up differently on my credit report. Even though I owed the same amount of money it would look like I was in over my head, because the balance on my credit cards would be very high compared to my credit limit. So my credit score would take a hit in a big way.

I scraped up an extra three hundred dollars to send to the credit card people.

Other than that, I have about a hundred and fifty dollars left to last until next Thursday, so I'm doing OK. Any time I have anything left in my checking account on payday, I move it over to my savings account, so I have about a hundred and eighty dollars in there so far.

Next payday I don't have any payments due on anything, so after living expenses, I intend to just save the money for Christmas presents.

I got an American Express card this week, which I had always wanted to get.
Ok, so I don't subscribe to the whole "cut them all up and put them in a fishbowl" idea. That works for most people, because their problem is that they got into trouble because of impulse buying on their credit cards. I still deny having this problem. In fact, I still deny having debt problems at all.
I just wanted to get out of debt before I had a problem.
I don't have difficulty with the idea of going into debt in general. It's the getting into debt beyond your means that is the problem. But you usually don't know that you are in beyond your means until it is too late, or something changes and you can no longer afford what you used to be able to.