I am so anxious about my American Express situation.

I have to deposit that check.

I also need to pay off $4500 this summer.

I have also taken out something like $13,000 in student loans for living expenses, in addition to my $10,000 in student loans for tuition.

That means I am now nearly $30,000 in debt after this year of school.

I don't regret it at all. But I do regret the parts of it that may have been unnecessary. I kind of feel like I am wasting about $1000 a month.

I can see that I do not really have a reason to be scared, because I can pay off at least $9000 of it this summer if I am disciplined, and then I hope I can work for about 15 months and pay off a big chunk of the rest of it. . . maybe close to all of it.

But I am not really living in accordance with my goals. This is not what I want to do with my money, spending $40 a day on eating out and other wasteful expenses. That's over $1000 a month. Think of what I could do with $1000 a month!

I want to feel a little bit more in control of my spending, and I think that means eating out less, maybe even not at all. I feel much better and more in control if I am not eating out at all. I wonder if I can make that an ongoing practice, and what it would look like.

I think I have been naive to assume that I could just decide to spend less money, and that it would be relatively easy compared to my other goal, which was making more money. I think I need to be realistic. . . that spending less money is a big project, one requiring many different skills and several months, or years, to learn. I need to keep at it. And that means continuing to work at not eating out, and continuing to work at recording my expenses.