Financial responsibility?

Screw that, I say; meet my new Precious, a Sony HC3 hi-def handycam in a Light & Motion Bluefin housing with external monitor:

Some of you may recall that after Australia, Jeff and I put a moratorium on spending so we could pay off credit cards for a while. So why throw thousands more dollars into camera gear?

Well, partly because I’m a consumer whore who sucks at delayed gratification, obviously.

Also, for the sake of our marriage. I’ll explain:

We dropped a lot of money last year on gear for Jeff. The new Canon 5D, a housing, and a surprisingly expensive computer monitor. These were all things I agreed to at the time, but it started to really bug me that Jeff got to have his turn – and then when it was theoretically my turn to spend, we had to be responsible.

Don’t get me wrong, we’ve spent money at my instigation as well. But mostly on things that we both get to enjoy; dive trips and the like.

Lately, every time Jeff’s even mentioned a desire to make a purchase of any sort, my hackles have instantly gone up. After all, it’s =my= turn next, and anyway, we’re being responsible. Every money-related fight we had came back to something along the lines of: “well, YOU just spent all that money last year, so you have no say.” Not fair, but hard to help.

We decided to hell with it; we’ll run the cards back up if it’ll even the scales and get rid of one more thing to fight about, and soothe the resentment that I seemed unable to quell or even hide. So far it’s worked like a charm; I feel like a huge weight is off my shoulders, and Jeff’s been totally supportive.

Of course, now we really DO have to be financially responsible for a while. But I think we can handle it, since there’s nothing left to buy. (Except a high definition television, new dive computers, more dive trips…. time to work on that delayed gratification!)

And it was so worth it – you should see the footage from this baby (I’ll try to post some soon). Soooo pretty. My Precious… :)