Payday just isn't my favorite day of the week.

I know that may sound strange, but honestly, I dislike payday pretty badly. In fact, I bet if I kept track of my mood for each day of the past two or three months, I am quite sure that every other Friday would count as some of my worst days. Totally absurd, especially for a girl who is nearly 5 months into her first "real job" post-college, and who is making a rather decent starting salary, right?

At first it was obviously fantastic to bring home that four-digit paycheck. I hadn't seen anything like it at Target unless there had been a holiday, which I also worked for time and a half, and maybe threw in a few dozen hours of overtime as well. But I quickly realized that I had to take control of my ever-increasing debts, especially since I was (am) young, healthy, and fresh off a two month stint of near-unemployment preceded directly by Christmas. That did NOT help things at all - unless of course, you work for Capital One. Then you might think my situation was fantastic and improving at a glorious pace. Hell, you'd even spontaneously raise my interest rate 5 points just for shits and grins. Get her while the plastic's hot, right?

Well luckily I saw through it all and mustered the guts to shove my credit card deep into the filing cabinet to cool off (replaced in my wallet by a never-swiped and therefore pure and untouchable unless in the most extreme emergency MasterCard, in case the '93 Honda just doesn't want to see it's 15th year of pavement). I even managed to convince Bank of America to give me a 0% interest rate card to transfer the dreaded balance to through next summer, so Mr. 13.8% APR could kiss it and I could make progress without $30 in interest every month.

However, I still had to dedicate myself to a new and drastically harsh pay-down plan if I was going to reap the full benefits of the 0% deal, clear my conscience, and get my credit into a good place for the looming car purchase and SOMEDAY allow myself the flexibility to save for a down payment so that I don't have to be at the mercy of my finicky furnace, drafty windows, and low-end AC units in this little oven/igloo I call home.

I should also mention the "other" credit card stuff I had to pay off before their promo rates expired this summer - there was the Discover that was "just for Christmas" (yeah right), and the couple hundred on the Firestone card after I dropped my car off for an oil change and some of the most expensive pieces of rubber and metal ever made. So it goes.

So I made up my mind, broke out the calculator and notepad, and budgeted myself into penny-pinching oblivion. All of that new-found wealth that I happily looked forward to every other Friday was now gone before the direct deposit had a chance to get say hello to the overdraft fees and $4 Subway debits it landed next to. Thanks to my near-psychotic online bill pay scheduling, I had those huge payments whisked away to never-never land at Visa, MasterCard, Discover, wherever, the moment my account went from near-red to black.

In the meantime, I've kept meticulous notes about the balances, calculated how many days till each was going to be paid off, showed myself best-case scenarios, worst-case scenarios, and scheduled my paycheck to have it's happy little four figures ripped apart well into '08.

It's enough to make a girl cry. Actually, it HAS made a girl cry. And pout, and whine, and moan, and sigh, and almost just give up. It's made me a real blast to hang out with on those Fridays, should you be so lucky. But I am starting to feel like I'm getting somewhere. The two little guys will be goners before the temperatures drop below 80 regularly again, and the big guy is going to see some serious dents before long. It's really really hard not to keep using my card though, and that makes me mad, too.

I don't want to throw away all my hard work and "sacrifice" (can you really count not being able to go out to dinner and shop at Whole Foods as a sacrifice when children are starving in North St. Louis?), but bridging the gap between that last $20 from the ATM on Monday and payday on Friday isn't easy. Actually, it's way TOO easy to just say screw it, I need this, I want this, it's so-and-so's wedding/bar mitzvah/first night out of the house in two months, whatever, and break out the plastic. I've done it a few times, but nothing too awful yet. I'd like to keep it that way.

So tomorrow I do NOT look forward to checking my account online, and seeing all of those automatic debits put in place before I even finish my first cup of coffee. What I WILL look forward to is the day when I DON'T see them there, perhaps sometime next June. It will have been worth it. In the meantime I'll continue to count the days, and also be praying that the Accord keeps running and that Andrew doesn't run out of MacGyver-like recipes to make do with the bachelor-like state of my refrigerator and pantry. At least chickpeas are cheap. I'll have all the hummus and falafel I can get, no credit card required.