I logged into my email today and saw a message from Capital One (I have a credit card with them). They reminded me that back in December, I had participated in a promotion with Klout and my bonus was here! I had completely forgotten about that so I give a lot of credit to Capital One for actually following up on this promotion. I find that, many times, companies just never follow up on these kind of things.

Once I logged in, I was greeted with:

Oooh exciting! I scrolled down wondering what kind of bonus I would have gotten. I knew that the promotion was basically, depending on your Klout score, you would get a certain percentage cash back over a period of time. I was pretty sure I was given 5% back but I had no idea how much I had spent in that time. Until…

Yeah! $41 cash back! That’s the kind of thing I want to see when I log onto my email in the morning. It’s so nice having unexpected money.

But do you see the problem here? Yup…In one week, I spent $829.

I don’t remember exactly what I spent the money on. I know I didn’t have any gigantic purchases in December but what I did have was a hell of a lot of Christmas shopping. I buy presents for my family and all of my friends and my total for Christmas, 2011 ended up being almost $1000.

Now some of that was paid back by G because I bought presents for the two of us to give together. However, that doesn’t excuse the fact that because I went crazy buying Christmas presents, I was barely able to save any money in December. I’m working on improving this attitude and I really hope I don’t do this again this year.

But this does raise the question – should I be happy that I got $41 cash back? Or sad that I managed to spent over $800 in one week? I’m leaning towards the latter right now.