Tonight Discover wanted to know whether I had made a purchase for more than twice my credit limit. I have not used the card at all since a $5 purchase a few months ago. I’d not previously heard of the business or location where the purchase was made. The physical card has been in my possession and I have no reason to suspect anyone I know.

I think that I follow the FTC’s guidelines fairly well. I am not sure what I could have done to prevent something which seems so random.

In one way I think that this is just a normal hazard of using credit cards and has not really hurt me. But in another way I think that it probably should not happen to me twice a year. I have no idea how I could stop it. Well, that is not quite true. Having fewer credit cards would be a very good thing. I cannot get rid of any cards right now since the only one with no ballance is also the one that I have had longest. It is not worth hurting my credit score just to eliminate one of my cards.

Photo by Joe and Sarah licensed under Creative Commons

TheHonestDollar has a post up about how personal finance is like riding a bike. It’s a great post, and the comments got me thinking about training wheels and the role of parents in how we learn to ride bikes and handle money.

I learned to ride a bike when I was around five. My parents gave me a helmet and insisted that I wear it all the time, but they did not give me training wheels. Somehow I just figured out how to ride with the help of my older siblings, and things went from there.

That is a little like the way my parents handled training their children about personal finance. They taught me to never borrow money (that’s a little bit like wearing a helmet) but they did not give me anything else in the way of suggestions about budgets or credit scores, never mind financial help once I was eighteen (so no training wheels).

Since I decided that a college degree was worth much more than being debt free in my early twenties, I guess I am rather like a five-year-old riding a bicycle without a helmet or training wheels. Falling over has not been fun, but I hope that In Debt and I will figure it out eventually!

I think that I will probably handle things differently with my children, but I am not sure whether there really is any one best way to train children about finances. For those of you with children (or plans for them in the future) how do you plan to help them learn to manage their finances?

Photo by Conor Lawless licensed under Creative Commons

My wisdom teeth are coming out in a few weeks. In order to keep the cost around $500 instead of $1,000, I have decided to skip the IV sedation, and stick with just novacaine.

In Debt thinks that is crazy. I think that it is both reasonable and necessary, given the current state of our finances. We’ll see what I think once I’m actually in the dentist’s chair though!

I am not too scared of this because I know exactly how it happened, and have an idea of how we can pay it off, but still… It’s more than $10k! In addition, I owe around $19k in student loans, and In Debt has about $10k left on his car.

**Around 80% are mine. Okay, eight of them are mine. I know. The funny thing is, I’ve had lots of cards and no debt in the past. I just have a card addiction. Along with eliminating debt, my goal for this year is to also reduce the number of credit cards. But I’ll leave that for another post… and another day.

Once I started college I became financially independent. It was not much of a shock, because I had always expected it and had saved most of my income to cover it. Still, I had to take out loans which I intended to pay off before interest accrued. I also got my first credit card and payed the balance each month. I kept my academic loans under $5,000 by working while in school and taking time off to pay them off when they started to get too large for my comfort.

Then I met In Debt, and seemingly every interaction involving money was painful for me. I tried to squelch most of it, after all what he did with his money was his business and I could just find ways of avoiding spending more than I could afford. Besides, I knew that some moderation would be good for me.

Even as our relationship got more serious, In Debt did not realize how different our views really were. Due to a necessary move and month job hunting, I ended up with $3,000 in credit card debt this spring. I paid it off in a little over two months while working for a temp agency. While In Debt knew about it & I would update him with glee as the figure diminished with my weekly payments, he was not conscious of what I chose to go without to eliminate the debt.

Gradually we became more aware of each other in our financial choices. We sat down and looked at credit reports (his score was about 10 points higher than mine- dratted car loan! ) and talked some about the financial implications of our plans for the next few years. I finally realized that the smartest thing was to finish my undergrad degree ASAP, even if it meant taking on more debt in the short term. He decided to take the risk of moving, something which meant giving up job stability, but potentially doubling salary.

And now, here we are today. Very different and very in debt. But I’ll let In Debt tell about that.