So along every road there are stumbles, and my path to being debt-free is just like the any other. And this weekend represented one big stumble - books.

I read voraciously. And I love books. And I love serial novels, big, sweeping fantasy epics that take multiple volumes to finish. So this weekend I finished volume two of a series, and I hadn’t bought volume three yet. So I looked at my Amazon seller account (by the way, selling your used books on Amazon is a great way to move some of your excess bookage and get a few pennies back for them). I saw that I had about $25 in there, so I converted that into an Amazon gift certificate, thinking that it would be nigh-instantaneous process, and I could order my new book and satisfy my jones.

Not so much - 2-3 business days to process my gift certificate, and then a couple days to get my book. ARGH! I am sad panda. So as I head off to visit my parentals for my birthday, I happen to pass a bookstore on the way home. I pop in to see if they have the book I want in paperback, and break down and buy it in hardback.

Then I pick up another book in hardback.

Then I realize that I’ve spent $57 in the bookstore when I could have bought these two books on Amazon for more like $30. And I now have an Amazon gift certificate that I could have instead taken as cash into my checking account.

Not quite $100 for two books. Well done, Johnny. Well done.

It was a good book, but I’m not sure it was $100 worth of good. But that’s a small stumble. It’s actually smaller than the really stupid stumble I made this week. I stopped using credit cards months ago, because I paid them off and really do think that they’re evil. This idea of evil credit card companies was certainly reinforced by Aspire this week. I had called a while back to get them to drop the annual fee off the card, which was a whopping $79/year. They refused, and I had asked Suzy to call and cancel the card. Well, one thing led to another, and the card never got cancelled.

So the annual fee was applied. I threw away the credit card statement when it came, because I didn’t use the card. So when I missed the payment date for the annual fee, I got a $39 late payment charge, plus a finance charge on the $79, to bring the total balance to $119 for forgetting to cancel the card!

Suddenly my books look downright cheap in comparison. Dave Ramsey calls stuff like this “Stupid Tax,” and I certainly felt stupid as I paid the bill.