I don't know if that is a good sign or a bad sign. People talk to me about buying cars, and their hospital bills, and I see hot tubs on people's properties. I imagine our recent mortgage refinance will mean a hit on our credit score, so it would be best to buy the car with 100% cash, or a combination of cash and credit cards. I see that my liquid savings is not quite enough to pay off our home equity line of credit. I also see we use our credit card every month, and not all families do that. I would like to see us restrict our credit card use to: ordering online; emergency usage; out-of-the-country usage; rental cars; hotel reservations.

From a May 2011 HousingWire article:
[quote]U.S. consumers also reduced their revolving credit card debt by 18% since mid-2008 through default, borrowing less or paying down debt outstanding. This is the longest and fastest credit card deleveraging since record keeping began in January 1968.[/quote]

That's good. No doubt the raising of the minimum payment as mandated by Congress had something to do with that.

My husband tries to comfort me to say that many people are in debt, but I say if one is uncomfortable with one's debt burden, one has taken on too much debt.

We aren't doing ourselves any financial favours by eating out, either. The boy and man went to Flying Squirrel Pizza to welcome it to our neighbourhood, and the man returned looking as overjoyed as he was in Gainsbourg, looking at the Scopitones and having good food, booze and dessert. Then we learned a beloved dessert place may be lost as the building housing it is to be demolished.

Today I perform inventories on the freezer, pantry and larder, as I promised myself not to go shopping for groceries until I had a menu plan, and I'm buying lunch supplies for the boy tomorrow, the day before school starts. I hate turfing out vegetables that have gone bad.

My son and I are attempting to eliminate the word "should" from our vocabularies. Replacing it with "must" or "will" or "would like to" or "plan to" makes it sound less like we are distanced from making appropriate choices in our lives.