Immediate Payments

"Do not say to your neighbor, 

'come back tomorrow and I'll give it to you' 

when you all ready have it with you."  - Proverbs 3:28

You may have noticed that some of the amounts listed under the Current Month's payments on my sidebar can be rather small (as low as $1.00) and sometimes frequent.  This certainly is not the way most people pay their credit cards.

The reason for this is that any time I have money that I can put toward the credit card (that is, any money that is not accounted for in our budget and thus looked at as extra money), I make an immediate payment to our current credit card step.

I figure, why wait?  If it just sits around as cash or floating around in our bank account, it has more of a chance of being spent.  Even if we account for it as an amount to be paid to our debt, things can come up.  Having that money there and available makes it easy to think, oh just this once I can use a couple of extra dollars toward groceries or clothes.  Or even to second guess whether or not it's best used toward credit or some other purchase we've been pondering.

So I don't allow the temptation.  Once that money is made and in our account or even saved from cutting something out of the budget or under-spending, the payment is immediately made, no matter how small.  Such is the joy of nowadays credit card payment apps.  A couple of clicks and I no longer have access to that money.  The temptation is gone and the credit card is smaller.

No extra thoughts, spreadsheets or accounting for.  Just paid.