Limit Splurging and Kill Your Debt

Today we live in a society where anything is attainable if you have the money to obtain it. Instant gratification seems to be the motto of the civilized world. More often then not however, everything that is attainable for us shouldn't be. The reason being, is that we don't have enough money for it. But thanks to a little thing called credit, we all can get whatever we want and not worry about the money.

Unfortunately, all this spending catches up with us pretty fast, and we're stuck with a bill and often nothing or very little to show for it. There's nothing worse than paying for something that you don't have anymore or isn't worth what you paid for it anymore, and so obviously we need to address why we don't have it anymore. The simple fact is that most of us are guilty of one thing that sucks all of our money away. It's called splurging.

We all know what that means. We splurge when we eat out and order dessert, or we're in line at the grocery store and grab some candy and add it to our bill. Or maybe you bought the CD of the latest musical craze, and listened to it once before throwing it on the shelf in the living room along with the 150 other Cd's that you never listen to. We spend an awful lot of money on stuff we don't care about a week later. This is the critical leak in our sinking ship of financial distress. The answer? PLUG IT!

There's no easy way of doing this but addressing the problem head on: we need to stop spending money on stupid needless things. Lets look at some simple math:

Lets say you go to the mall every month. You know you go more often than that but we're just hypothesizing here. You always buy a CD because you want to have a nice collection, or you heard that song on the radio and want to listen to it a home again. OK. The average CD costs somewhere in the area of $15. You buy only one CD every month. That's $180 that you've spent over the whole year. Now depending on how much you earn for a living,you could be spending $250 before tax dollars for that splurge on a CD. Do you listen to all of your Cd's that often? Probably not, maybe you even feel regret over buying some of them. I know I do. (Evanescence ??What was I smoking!)

The same could be applied to DVDs. Why buy a DVD that we're only going to watch once? We could go to blockbuster and rent it for under $5 (and even less then that from a small local movie shack). So don't buy a DVD unless its one you simply MUST have, and even then, think about it for longer then you have been.

At the mall there's a great coffee shop. What's it called again? Oh yes, Starbucks! Although Starbucks might make your mouth water and you might really be in the mood for coffee, is it worth $5? Say you bought a Starbucks every week for a year at $5 a pop (this is Canadian, American may be a tad lower, but honestly...) 5x52= $260 big ones! That's a car payment! If you're making $20 an hour at your job, that's almost half of a week that you have to work to make those before tax dollars. That's a lot of work for 52 half drank cold-at-the-bottom grande maciatos!

We all eat out to much. Eating out with friends is great, and I admit that I don't care if I do it once or twice a week. But we do care how much we spend. So although it's an effort, do we need to order an appetizer before our meal? Eating at home is incredibly cheaper, so what if we ate at home, then went out for drinks? Or maybe just put some thought into our evening before hand and keep the party at home. Eating out seldom costs less than $20 and often can be upwards of $35 for just that one meal. Compare that with the cost of eating at home for maybe $3 or $5 a meal. Throw in a few beers and you're still under $10! There's a lot of money to be saved there, thousands even per year.

She goal is to limit your splurging. If you use your credit card a lot, start using cash and you'll see how fast you're burning through it. Even by saving yourself $20 a week, you'll be $500 richer at the end of the year, or with $500 less debt then you could have. And that's why you're reading this in the first place.