It's been a rough start to the new year and I've made zero progress with any of my debt, I even had to borrow more money from family to cover some bills I couldn't pay. So now I owe more money to my mom and BF, which makes me feel really crummy. I got a medical bill in the mail, I'll just have to pay that off in small chunks. I still don't have the tuition money I need for school yet, but I'll just have to tighten down on my spending to be able to scrape it up.
Hopefully next month and March will be better.

I was able to pay $110 to credit card 2, so the new total is $185.48...so hopefully in another month or two that one will be history.

It's not even December yet and I'm already stressing out over christmas spending, I should have paid off those credit cards long before now, I have already cut way back on my holiday spending versus last year. I'm only buying 1 present per family member this year and limiting the amount to $25.
I am just going to have to pay off the cc's slower than I want to, like a $100 chunk at a time, also there is the tuition bill I have due around January 11, so that's another $325 I have to scrounge up somewhere.
I wrote out a budget for 2009, so if I stick to that all year long I will be in much better shape financially and be ready for the holidays next year without stressing out so much. I gave myself until March to pay off the credit card debt and start really saving for the emergency fund.

I checked out the website for Venture bank, it sounds like one of those too good to be true things...does anyone know anything about them?

I had plans to pay off the lowest cc first, then I called to double check on what the interest rates were on each of them, the highest cc had 29%...so I followed my boyfriends advice and get that one paid off first. It feels good to do that, but I will have to be extremely careful about spending for 2 weeks till the next paycheck comes in.
The last week was rough too my poor, pitiful checking account only had $2.62 in it, after the large cc payment and the $45 cell phone bill hits it, there won't be much left in it this time either. I do have a extra $20 left over after buying groceries though that I can stick in there.
I have decided to cancel the cc that had the interest rate of 29%, I am thinking also of canceling the other two cc's that I have too. I need some advice about that...is it a good or bad idea to have no credit cards at all?

I counted up what was in the jar of loose change and it totaled up to $50 some odd bucks.

I hope to pay my three credit cards off over the next three months.
I'm going to pay Mastercard $237.03 in the middle of November. Then pay Mastercard $249.79 in the middle of December, and finally pay $355.66 to Visa in January.

After that I need to really start working hard on setting up and saving money into an emergency fund. I will not be entirely debt free until m car loan is paid off, but I feel okay about that because it's the first car loan I have ever had.

I started really keeping track of my spending about a month ago, so I am going to keep up with doing that from now on. I made a really big change in the way I think about money, it still seems to slip out of my grib far too easily but I am working really hard on changing that.

credit card 1 $355.66
credit card 2 $249.79
credit card 3 $237.03