money management, it's all relative

This morning was pretty exciting.  For the first time in a longass time, my checking account balance read more than $1-2000 (hey, I'm workin' here, and still recovering from 8 long months living in Manhattan), in fact, it was up to a whopping SIX THOUSAND DOLLARS and change (PSE&G bills of only $36 are awesome.  Everyone makes fun of me for keeping the heat and water heater turned off all the time, even through the winter, but WHO IS LAUGHING NOW).  This is from my bonus and tax return of course, because god knows I eat out every damn day and am incapable of doing any actual concerted saving, so I did what any straight thinking kid straight out of college would do with the extra money:

paid of $3000 of my damn credit card and got it down to just over a thousand (!!), which is kind of sad because it means that without another infusion I won't see the balance up there for a long long while.  Are 22 year olds with fiscal responsibility sexy?  Yeah you think they are.

That was a whole 8 seconds of fun (clickclickclickclick), I'll tell you that much.

The sad fact is I don't even have $3000 worth of junk I'd want to blow it on.  Maybe clothes, maybe jewelry, maybe a new couch, maybe a new computer, maybe a new flat screen TV? but nothing that really EXCITES me.  Hell, I'm more excited about the new color printer/scanner/fax I spent the morning setting up at work than any of that stuff (I get a great Geek Rush installing hardware or peripherals).  So maybe I do sort of know how to live frugally, even if I'm not always good at it, just by the way of the fact that I know how much I make and I'm not an idiot with money (mostly).  Without student loans, car note, medical bills, mortgage or anything, it means I only owe $1100 to the industrial banking complex known as THE BEAST (and god help us when it becomes sentient).  That's not so bad.

At this point, I'm not even really sure why I have any credit cards.  I guess I should keep them around for really big purchases I want to make so that it doesn't immediately drain out my bank account, but I'm not sure how to vet the stuff I want to buy to figure out what should go on credit and what should be paid for with cash.  It certainly would've been nicer to be able to keep that $3k and squirrel it away instead of paying now for a year's worth of dumb crap, but that's all relative.  It was nice at the time to have that dumb crap (or to eat), I'm sure.