and I wish it was with good news. It is not! I seem to have ignored all I have learned during my brief time blogging here and dug myself deeper into debt. With the holidays quickly approaching I feel my panic creping in. I figured it was time to jump back on the wagon.

Since the last time I was here I was able to pull off hubby's suprise bday trip to Salem. It was awesome...thank you Koppur for all your advice! We stayed in Peabody and made the trip in everyday. We are thinking of going back next year we had so much fun!

I hate the feeling of having to rely on my husband becuase I have so much debt. I feel like I depend on him too much for things while I rack up the credit cards and live like we are rich. Several times I have tried to change my attitude towards money but nothing sticks. I have to make this work this time.

The first part of my plan is going to be paying off my smallest credit card first. I hate making minimum payments so I usually pay $100 to each card and I don't see that I am really getting anywhere. I am going to change my payments to making the minimum on all but the lowest and pay a bigger chunk to that one. I am sure this is common sense to most of you out there but for some reason the idea eluded me all this time.

I tried using Mint for a short period of time and got very annoyed very quickly. After the hassle of putting all my accounts in their system had issues and for about 10 days it wasn't updating half my accounts. I just deleted everything from their system today. I can't be bothered with a program that doesn't work. I liked that it was online-I was able to check it while at work.

Well, here's to my reinvigorated attempt to get this monster only control. Baby steps this time.