First Things First

I finally started doing my homework about how to save money. There is a lot out there on the web about it. Everyone agrees the first step is to eliminate your credit card debt, so I'm going to take that to heart and make my first priority paying off my credit cards.

I stopped my paper statements a while ago in favor of using the internet, which is insanely convenient and I love ebanking or whatever it's called. But I ran into something interesting looking over my statements yesterday, which I admittedly rarely do. They never post the interest charge. It doesn't make it on to the current statement nor the previous statement, but the starting balance is about $50 more for the current statement than the previous statement. They charged me, they just never told me about it. Then, I started looking for it but I couldn't find my APR listed anywhere. I had to search for ten minutes for one, which is %10.49, and the other neither Tiff nor I could find anywhere in my online account. Very strange, and more than a little troubling.

Back to my debt, I should say that for a long time I tried very hard to not carry any credit card debt, but it doesn't take too many big, and not-so-big, purchases before your balance is more than your willing to match at the end of the month. For me, I had several months of semi-large purchases and my credit cards collected numbers far above what I had ever wanted them to be. When one hit the $6,000 mark I took it out of my wallet and started paying it off.

Today, between two cards, I have $4,685.45. Also today, I paid off the smaller of the two, the one I don't know the APR of, in full... all of $286.84 leaving me with a credit card total of $4,398.45.

Question: is it "First things first" or "First thing's first?" I guess it doesn't matter.