So, in the past month, my net worth has shot up incredibly. This is largely due to a big lift in stock prices that has affected my 401k, brokerage account and my Roth IRA. While I feel great about being “in the black”, it’s really a false sense of accomplishment. I haven’t been able to chip away more debt – or rather – I haven’t been disciplined enough to chip more debt away. In fact, I have added to my debt through the use of an “emergency credit card”.

This brings up a few things:

1. Why didn’t I use my emergency savings? I am in a way – I’ve transfered out money to cover the amount that I’ve borrowed on the card. It just hasn’t hit the debt as of the time of this post.
2. Why do I own an “emergency credit card”?!

Well, I shredded all of my cards a while back and it turned out that was a mistake. The mistake wasn’t really shredding the cards, the mistake was that I wasn’t ready for it. Cold turkey sounds good – but my emergency fund wasn’t really set-up at the time. So when something hit – whether it was a car repair or something less of an emergency – I was screwed. In fact, I learned the hard way that you do need to keep one credit card around for work/travel. Car rental companies – at least National – don’t take debit cards when you take out a car. And hotels will take a debit card – but they put a large hold on your account right up front, which didn’t help my budget at the time.

Bottom line is that I know it’s bad to still have a credit card and it’s even worse to use that credit card. But I feel like as long as I’m honest with myself (on this blog) and work to pay the charge off (and more) as soon as I can, I am using credit responsibly.

…though, is there such a thing as responsible credit use when you’re still $14K in debt?