I Can Have PayDay Blog

Thanks to the feedback I received from Susan I’m reconsidering my credit card idea. I had a feeling I’d catch some heat about it. It was probably a really naive sounding plan. My new idea is we could each get our own individual cards, we’d only use the cards for shared expenses and agree to pay half of each others. That’s almost what we’re doing already. Except with a credit card we only have to make payments once a month, which seems like it would be much easier to keep organized, as well as prevent things like BudgetBlogger’s $100 pizza.

There are only four people in the world that know I once paid $100 for a pepperoni pizza from Pizza Hut.

The first few years that I lived on my own, I shared an apartment with two other girls. Each week on Tuesday evening we’d order a pizza and rent a movie from the video store. The week that it was my turn to pay, my checking account was beyond empty. I had just mailed out bills and was counting on playing the float a bit, hoping that I’d deposit my next paycheck before the checks got cashed. Things didn’t work out quite the way I had planned.

The $13 check to Pizza Hut bounced. Pizza Hut charged me $20 for bouncing a check. Then my bank charged me $20 for writing the bad check. Two days later Pizza Hut deposited the check a second time which cost me another $20. This time my bank charged me $27 – their fee for a second bounced check. That’s how I ended up paying $100 for the pizza.

I can honestly say the money wasn’t even the worst part. I left out the part about my dad being a vice president at the bank where I had my checking account. It was the same account I’d had since college, and his name was still on the account. The branch manager called him about my negative balance.

I didn’t know about pay day lenders like www.USApaydaylenders.com and www.paycheckatm.com back then, but I wish I had. The pizza-check follies continued for 12 days. A payday loan would have cost me half as much money and prevented a lot of stress-filled days — not to mention the lectures from my parents.

Then again, maybe we could get credit cards to use for our individual expenses. That way all our “real” (vs. credit) money will go towards our joint monthly “needs” expenses (I put needs in quotes there because we don’t really need high definition satellite television) rather than our personal wants (like his video games, and my car parts).

Even though I like to think we’re good with money, I’m afraid we’d fall prey to the temptation that credit cards present. But really, we both have gone this long with just our debit cards, do we really need credit cards? What I’m most worried about with just debit cards is having money in the right account at the right time. It’s really incredible when you think about it how much credit is really about, literally, buying time. Like BudgetBlogger points out, payday loans are great for when the timing of your finances is off, but there isn’t that same temptation. Even though pay check loans (and title loans) are easy to get (especially with online applications available form places like titleandpaydayloans.com), they aren’t like credit cards, which are always there in your wallet, saying, “go ahead, charge it!”