My Credit Card Update (It's Not Good)

You can't teach an old dog new tricks and I have a hard time breaking old habits. That's right, the revolving door known as credit card debt has returned to haunt my life and now I am really scrambling to figure out how the heck I can pay it down as soon as possible.

It has been some time since I reported on the status of my credit card debt, most of the time I drop little hints that "I only have about $1000 of CC debt". For the most part of the last few months I have been doing great, usually hovering around a combined principle on all cards of $1,000, which I do not see as a bad thing. It's only a bad thing when that number doubles.. err I mean triples... okay maybe a little more.

Right now I am staring at a grand total of $3,900. I have a significant amount left to pay on my lady's engagement ring, but that is a 0% card and my monthly payments are set up so I will be finished paying that one month before the interest kicks in (Proof that I can do something right!). The new total of credit card debt was between two cards and I use the past test because I transferred $1,600 from one card to the other on a 0% balance transfer until February 2010.

I am not going to lie, I had everything under control, but then over the last few months, a bunch of my cash that I was saving up (Non-emergency fund savings) was needed in other areas. From the beginning of June til the end of July, I earned $1,350 from officiating summer league basketball games. I was working extremely hard and taking on a ton of hours every week. I was planning on knocking out one of the cards, leaving me with just 1 card at $2,500. However, some family obligations came up where my parents had to take care of things for our engagement ceremony and they needed cash. Poof! The $1,350 was out of my hands a few days after I totalled it up and deposited it in my savings account. It had to be done, family comes first.

Some personal spending makes up a portion of the CC debt. I had a bachelor party weekend in A.C. a few weeks back where I got the rooms for my friends and I, so I am still waiting to get checks from people that will total $520. I paid for my weekend from my winnings on the poker table, and whatever I had left went in a pot to go towards the CC debt. I also booked some tickets for October for another friends bachelor party in Las Vegas totalling $610, half of which I will be receiving from another friend whose tickets I booked. Also, my car decided to give me issues over the last few months that ran me $800, all of which I had to put on my card because my cash flow that I was banking was depleted.

So lets look at the debt vs cash coming in to see what is left. A total of $3,900 in debt and a total of $840 in cash that I better receive within the next two weeks, gives me a total of $3,100 in credit card debt left. The goal is to pay this down to $0 before I go to Vegas in October. A very tough challenge, especially since summer league basketball just ended, which means referee money is going to be scarce.

With all that being said, I am going to have to spend the next few days devising a strategy to get this done. The cards are out of the wallet because there is no way I can pay this down if I am adding onto it every month. Is it time to tap into the emergency fund? Love to hear what you think i can do and all the things I am doing wrong.