I can't believe it's that easy!

It feels great to have my bills paid off early without any stress! We get paid weekly at the restaurant and Friday was my first paycheck from my first two official shifts. In addition to the cash I brought home (usually not much) from those two nights, I got a check for $355. Not too shabby! In addition to the $90 I already had towards loans from the training paycheck and cash tips, ta da! Loans are paid and I have $53 left over.

Friday a family rented the whole restaurant and they gave each waitress $100 that didn't have to be split with bartenders or bus boys. Nice!

Sunday was packed! From the minute we opened at 11:30 to having to close the kitchen early at 9pm, we constantly had people in there. There was a big Gamecock baseball game going so lots of parties came in and again I was the only waitress, with the same bartender and same bus boy as last weekend. This time however, the cooks couldn't keep up with the amount of people and they screwed us over big time. When people don't receive their food on time, they take it out on the tip they give the waitress even though it's not my fault at all. The cooks get paid the same amount if they work quickly or slowly so it was just infuriating when I had to sit and watch a family wait 45 minutes to get their food and I couldn't do anything but refill their drinks. I definitely didn't make as much as I could have because I got such poor tips, but $178 is still a nice chunk of change and would pay for one loan alone.

So over the weekend I ended up with $331 for me to split according to plan. Some of it will be coming in my paycheck on Friday and some of it I've already split up. I loved being able to make a bigger payment to my credit card debt and increasing my savings yesterday and I loved having some extra cash for the beach! It feels great that only a few shifts a week can make such a big difference in my financial stability. It definitely takes effort and will still take restraint because my personal spending money is still pretty low for a place like New York and for a craving for travel/shopping/food like I have but at least I'm tackling my debt and increasing my savings which is most important.